Lark’s Head Double Column
This is reverse-tension double column. It is great for tying any two things together:
- Wrist to wrist
- Ankle to ankle
- Wrists to ankles
- Wrists to thighs
- Knee to knee
- Ankle to thigh (as in a Frog Tie)
- Wrist to arm of a chair
- Even elbow to elbow (if your partner is ridiculously flexible)
It is simple to apply and yet results in a snug and secure tie.
Pros & Cons
Reverse-tension techniques like this have an advantage over with forward-tension techniques like the Wrap & Cinch in that you gain control of your partner early in the tie, so you don’t need to finish the tie to gain control. If they want to play struggle games you can quickly cinch it tight for a moment to get them under control, and then loosen it to the appropriate level to continue the tie.
They are also more secure. It cannot be untied until the tail is loosened or freed.
Reverse-tension techniques also have a disadvantage in that you have to do a number of “tail-pulls” to tie them. This takes more time than forward-tension techniques, and the extra time will be proportional to the length of your rope – the longer your rope, the longer the tie will take.
Note: A double column is usually tied similarly to a single column, but then you add a cinch in the middle. The same idea can be extended to three columns (as in Gote Shibari / Takate Kote (“TK”)) or more…
Important Safety Tip!
Wrists are sensitive, they must be handled with care.
- They have a lot of nerves and blood vessels near the skin on the inside of the wrists. Too much pressure there can impact blood flow or nerve conduction. Cuffs should never be too tight; you should always be able to run two fingers under a cuff.
- The wrist joint itself is also fragile. If you pull on wrists too hard, you can damage that joint or even push some of those small wrist bones into the wrong position. NEVER suspend someone by the wrists alone. Never tie someone in a position where rope is a applying heavy continual stress on the wrists.
- An example of this might be if you tied your partner’s wrists to the bedposts, then grabbed their feet and pulled them sharply toward the foot of the bed. In that scenario, you may end up applying too much pressure to the wrist joints. Tying your partner to a bed can be amazing fun, but make sure there is enough slack in the tie that they can move their arms and wrists enough to adjust the lay of the cuff and rope strands from time to time.
For this tutorial, I used one 10′ (~3m) piece of Braided Cotton Rope.
I usually use hemp rope provided by my affiliate Twisted Monk. Check them out for some amazing rope!
Prerequisites:
Video
Video Contents:
- Creating the Cuffs (0:17)
- Ending 1 – Split the tails. Lock with Square Knot (2:12)
- Safety & Converting Ending 1 to a Load-bearing Version (3:30)
- Ending 2 – Keep tails together. Lock with Half-Hitch (5:12)
- Ending 2 – Convert to Load-bearing, if desired (6:24)
The Core Technique with Ending Option 1
1. In this example we will tie together two wrists.
2. It can be useful to have your partner hold them a little bit apart like this so that you have some resistance to work against as you work.
3. Fold the rope in half.
4. Strangely, the “Lark’s Head Double Column” begins with a Lark’s Head. There are two ways to get the initial Lark’s Head around your partner’s wrists. The first one is to create your Lark’s Head first…
5. …and then put it around your partner’s wrists.
6. The other is to put the rope around your partner’s wrists, then reach through the bight to grab the tail…
7. …then pull the tail through and reverse the tension (this is where this type of tie gets the classification “reverse tension”). Note that I’ve put the bight on the side of the hands furthest from the thumb and the mouth. At the end of this tie, I will be putting the locking knot on this side as well, making it a little bit harder for my partner to escape.
8. Wrap the rope around your partner’s wrists at least once.
9. You can wrap it around twice if you wish for a total of six strands.
You typically don’t want more wraps than this, or you’ll start getting uneven tension in the strands when you cinch them tight
10. Reached through the secondary bight.
11. Hook the tail with your finger.
12. Pull the tail all the way through secondary bight.
13. Split the tails.
14. Run one tail around all the strands (those on both sides) in one direction and the other tail around all of the strands in the other direction.
15. Come back to your starting point. Now you can pull those tails and they will cinch down on all the wrist strands at the same time. So all the strands are at the same level of tightness, forming a cuff around each wrist.
16. There are a lot of important nerves and blood vessels that run through the inside of the wrist. Also, the wrist joint itself is fragile and you don’t want a huge amount of pressure on it. Therefore, it is important that you are able to slip two fingers inside of that cuff. If they are so tight that you cannot slide a finger underneath them, they are way too tight.
17. Once you have the proper tension, set it with an Overhand Knot.
18. Then convert that overhand knot into a Square Knot to lock everything off.
19. Hide your ends …
…or do something else with them, i.e. run the tail to something else and tie it off there.
20. Done!
Note that the knot side of this tie is not especially attractive. If you are planning to have a tie like this in photography, you may want to have the knot away from the camera side because the other side looks quite nice…
21. Done, with the knot facing away from the camera
Converting Ending 1 to a Load-Bearing version
1. Remember that it is these cinch lines that make the cords of the cuff get tighter. So you never want to use the tails coming out of the cuff to tie the cuffs to a hard point. If you do, any pulling your partner does will pull the cinch tighter and make the cuffs tighter. This is *bad*. So, if you want to attach your Double Column to a hard point, you need to convert it to a Load-Bearing version. This way you can pull on all the cords of the cuffs evenly, but in a way that does not make them clamp down more tightly.
2. To do this, grab a new rope
3. We are going to create a Lark’s Head Knot *around the Cinch Cords themselves*.
If your cuffs are properly tight (i.e. not *too* tight … you can slide two fingers under them), you should have a hole like this next to the wrists
4. Run the bight of the new rope through the inside of the cuff on one wrist from the hand side to toward the elbow … like this…
5. …and then coming back up through the cuff on the other side of the cinch…
6. …like this…
7. Now run your tail through the bight and tighten. You have just formed a Lark’s Head knot around the cords that make up the cinch lines of the cuff.
8. Now any tension you add will tighten around the cords of the *cinch*. This way the cords of the cuffs themselves do not clamp down on the wrists.
Try it. You’ll see what I mean 🙂
9. You may now lead them off to the next phase of your evil plan…
10. …or tie the cuffs to a hard point.
Ending Option 2 - Load-bearing
1. Complete core technique Steps 1-12.
2. With one hand, make a small loop on the side that the tail is naturally on.
3. With your other hand, reach between the columns and grab the tail.
4. Keeping the fingers of your first hand in that small loop you created, pull the tail up and around all of the ropes in the Double Column.
5. Feed the tail to the fingers of your first hand.
6. Pull the tail through that loop
7. Just to show you a variation on these cuffs, note that I have quite a bit of space between my partner’s wrists and the cinch line.
8. With this much space, I can simply pull the tail…
9. … Which will cause it to cinch down on the wrist lines, forming two solid cuffs for my partner’s wrists.
10. Do your safety check to make sure that some of space between the inside of the wrist and the ropes.
This version is already Load-Bearing. Pulling on that tail will not make the wrist cuffs clamp down any further.
11. However, if you are concerned that pulling the tail will clamp the cuffs too tightly on to the wrists, you can convert this to a Load-Bearing version similar to the way we did above, but using the same tail (not needing a new piece of rope).
12. Just as with that other technique, first pull your tail through the cuff on one side.
13. Like this.
14. Then pull the tail through the cuff on the other side.
15. Then run the tail through the place for you started.
Hey Lazarus,
It looks like you changed the technique of the load bearing larks head double column from what you previously had on here (the second pic at the top of the page). I had been using that version a lot. Do you prefer this method over the other? or is there a reason you replaced with a new version/technique? Thanks as always for what you do.
No, They both work just fine. The Lark’s-Head-around-the-cinch-lines version is just easier for many people. But as long as you load the cinch cords and not the cuffs, it should work fine!