Close photo of the words BOYS DANCE TOO in orange, yellow and red block lettering on a man's upper arm, worn with a white vest top.

Boys Dance Too lettering on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The image shows the words BOYS DANCE TOO set in bold, uppercase block letters stacked over three lines on the upper arm. The letters shift from orange to yellow to red, with a flat, solid fill and no shading. The lettering sits centrally on the arm against a plain, pale background, with a white vest top visible at the shoulder.

Lettering Upper arm Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bosun said dancing was for ballrooms in Cardiff and the girls who waited there, so on the third evening out of the Azores I hid behind the winch and watched Pim tune his melodeon. The air had gone soft and yellow as the sun dropped, and the deck was still warm through my boots. That afternoon Pim had painted three lines on the spare lifebuoy in ochre, lemon and vermilion, and it was the only bright thing on the whole grey ship.

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Harker came up the ladder with his pipe unlit and his jaw set. "Who's been at my lifebuoy?" Pim just pumped the bellows and nodded at the words. Harker read them twice, then looked at the men gathered on the hatch cover, the stokers with their black hands, the cook's boy with flour still on his cuffs. Nobody laughed. Old Ansel, who had carried the carpenter's chest since Liverpool and never once lifted his feet off the planks, set down his mug and held out his hand to me.

I shook my head. He simply waited, the way he waited for varnish to dry, patient and certain. So I took it. We went round the hatch in a clumsy box step, my boots catching on his, while the fo'c'sle hands beat time on the rail with their mugs. Harker turned his back and stared at the sea for a long while. Then he went below and came back with a bottle, and though he would not dance, he tapped his foot.

When the moon rose over the swell, Ansel said I had good feet for a valley boy. I told him it was the only compliment I'd had in four voyages, and he laughed until he coughed. Next morning the lifebuoy was back on its hook, the paint already rubbed at the edges, but nobody moved it. Every Saturday after that someone would ask whether the boys were dancing today.