Fine line tattoo of two upright symbols, one red and one black, each with a round head and horizontal bars, on the lower leg above the ankle.

Two red and black line symbols on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

Two small upright symbols sit side by side on the lower leg, each with a round head above a vertical stem and three horizontal bars. The red symbol on the left and the black symbol on the right use thin, even solid linework with no shading. The plain skin and pale paper backing keep the composition simple, with the tattoos centred in the frame.

Fine line Ankle Symbol Figure Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Porthaven could remember who first cut the marks into the sea wall, only that they were there before the lifeboat house and the fish market. A red one for the boats that came home, a black one for the boats that did not. Old Maud Trelawney kept the chisel in her apron and touched up the paint each spring, though the spray took the colour off faster than she could lay it on.

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The autumn Tom Pardoe failed to come back, his mother walked down to the wall at first light with a pot of black and found the red mark already scored over with a fresh line she did not recognise. She stood there a long while, her breath going out white over the stone. When she asked Maud who had done it, Maud only shrugged and said the tide had likely been at it, the way it was at everything else.

For three nights the wind came off the water and nobody slept well in the lower houses. On the third, someone knocked at Mrs Pardoe's door, and when she opened it Tom was standing there with salt in his hair and his boots full of harbour, not saying a word. She looked at him for the length of a held breath. Then she took the black pot down from its hook, and in the morning she painted the wall red where the black had been.