Black lettering tattoo reading 'bold as love' on the upper arm, seen from behind in soft natural light.

Bold as love lettering on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a woman's upper arm, seen from behind, with the words 'bold as love' tattooed in small black lettering. The script is a loose, slightly uneven hand in solid black ink. The arm is lit softly against a pale grey background, and her long brown hair falls beside her shoulder.

Lettering Upper arm Lettering Text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had scabbed by the time the Tern raised the Horn, and you kept touching it the way a man checks his pocket for a key. Bold as love, your mother used to say, steering you toward the school gate with one hand flat between your shoulders. You never asked her what it meant. Now the words sat on your arm in a wobbly hand, the one the tattooist in Bootle had called honest, and every time you hauled on a halyard the letters flexed with the muscle as if they were trying to keep up.

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Somewhere south of the Falklands the wind backed to the west and stayed there. Mr Dacre ordered the topsails reefed at four bells, then again at six, and the old schooner groaned like a cow in a flood. You were sent aloft with Tom Ellery, who was seventeen and afraid of nothing except his mother's letters. The yard bucked under your boots. He laughed at you for gripping the jackstay, and you laughed back, because a man who will not laugh on a yard has already lost the argument with the sea.

When the gale broke, the mate read out the mail from the Valparaíso packet, and there was nothing for you. You tore the last clean page from your notebook, wrote across it in pencil, folded it small and pushed it into the brandy bottle you had been saving for the Cape. Bold as love, and nothing more. You hammered the cork home with the heel of your hand, carried the bottle to the rail, and let it go into the grey wake, watching it bob until the white water took it.

Four months later a girl mending nets on a Valparaíso wall would find it tangled in the weed, unfold the page, and read the words aloud to her little brother, who would ask what they meant. She would not know either. Neither, if you are honest, do you.