Black ink tattoo of three open heart outlines joined by a flowing swirling line, shown on bare skin of the side of the body.

Three open hearts with a flowing swirl

Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three open heart outlines of different sizes, linked by a single continuous black line that loops and tails down the lower half of the design. The lines are smooth and of even weight with no shading, and the ink is solid black against light skin. The design is centred in the frame on a close, slightly soft photograph with a dark background at the right edge.

Other Heart Swirl Ribbon Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ansell kept the cord in a biscuit tin under the bench, one length of tarred hemp that had never been cut, only unpicked and wound back on itself for sixty years. When the boats came in on the evening tide, the men dropped their broken lines into her basket without a word, because everyone in Sallow Cove knew what the basket was for.

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Nell was fourteen and had been sent to the loft to learn the knots, not to ask questions. She asked anyway. Why one cord and not many? Mrs Ansell pulled a loop of it taut between her knuckles and told her about three sisters who had married three brothers, and how their father had tied the three households together with a single line so that no house could be lost without the others feeling the pull. When a boat went down, the cord was not cut. It was knotted off and passed on to the next.

The Marigold was two days overdue when Mrs Ansell's hands began to shake, and she set the tin in Nell's lap. "Your brother's knot is the one that's left," she said. Nell worked through the night with the lamp hung from a nail, her fingers raw from the tar, making the loops that would hold the family to the water. Somewhere after the church bell struck four, the tail of the cord slipped over the edge of the bench and began to run across the boards toward the door.

At first light a sail showed on the headland, and Nell went down to the harbour with the end still in her fist. She let the cord run out behind her, through the wet sand and up the slipway, as if it still knew the way home.