Black ink design of an anchor with a looping line leading to a flock of birds and the script words carry with me the weight of the sea, shown on a white background.

Anchor and birds with script quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black design of an anchor at the bottom, with a thin looping line rising to a flock of six birds in flight. Script lettering reading carry with me the weight of the sea runs beside the birds. The linework is bold solid silhouettes for the anchor and birds with a fine, flowing stroke for the line and script, all in black on a plain white background.

Lettering Anchor Bird Script Sea Quote Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The galley stove had gone cold again, and Tomas Brennan had his hands in a bucket of grey water when the bosun came down the ladder with the letter. It was addressed to the ship in a hand he didn't know, care of the Port Glasgow agents, and it had been opened already. Nobody on the Marigold had the nerve to admit who did it.

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He dried his hands on his apron and read it standing under the lamp. It was from a woman in Ardrossan, a Mrs Ruth Cairns, asking whether the lad who had sailed as cook's boy with the Marigold in '31 had come home. Her son, Davy. She had sent three letters before this one. The bosun wanted to know if Tomas had known him. Tomas had. Davy Cairns had been the one who sang bad hymns over the potatoes and who kept a bent brass button in his mouth for luck.

That night, in the lee of the boat deck, Tomas wrote back on the back of a manifest. He wrote that the sea had taken Davy off the Cape rail in a squall, that the men had seen him go, that the captain had read the service twice because the first time the wind took the pages. He did not write that Davy had asked him, near the end, to carry a line for his mother if he didn't make it home. He had forgotten the line until now, staring at the dark water, and then it came back whole, the way things do when you have stopped reaching for them.

Carry with me the weight of the sea. He sealed the letter, pressed the button he had kept from Davy's coat into the envelope, and went back to the stove to light it, because the crew would want their supper whatever the sea was carrying.