Close-up of a black fine line anchor and the words I refuse to sink in script tattooed on the side of a woman's neck.

Anchor and script on the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black anchor sits above a line of cursive script reading I refuse to sink, running diagonally down the side of the neck. The linework is thin and even, with solid black ink and no shading or colour. The photograph is cropped close to the neck and ear, with soft natural light and a pale background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down on the bollard, the lot of you, and mind the gull muck. You'll not have heard of the Ada Mercer, the herring boat that came limping into Porthlin with her bow stove in and her wheelhouse full of brine. I'll tell it right, for I was on the quay the morning she came round the breakwater.

Keep reading

Her skipper was Tom Vosper, a man who never spent a word he could keep. What he did have was a daughter called Nell who could letter a board like a parson. The winter before, she'd painted the wheelhouse sign in her best copperplate, and it read I refuse to sink. The men took it for a joke until the Ada went out past the Gull Rock in a northerly that stood the gulls on their heads.

The sea took the foredeck, then the hatch boards, and the pump gave up at midnight. Vosper ran the anchor out over the bow, a hundred fathoms of chain, and held her head to the swell so she'd stop shipping water. Young Sammy Trewin, all of fifteen, was bailing with a bucket that had no bottom left to it, and he swore she'd be on the seabed by dawn. Vosper just lifted the lamp to the board and said, 'Then she'll have to read it first.'

They rode it out. The Ada came in on the flood with the anchor still hanging from her bow like a knocked-out tooth, and the board was there still, scraped but legible. Nell stood on the wall in her oilskins and wept, then laughed until she had to sit down. That board hangs in the Ship Inn now, and every new hand has to read it aloud before he's given a bunk. Mind your step going out, my love.

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