Traditional-style flash drawing of a black sleeve cuff holding bacon, with an anchor on the wrist and the words Bringing Home The Bacon around it, painted on watercolour paper.

Bringing home the bacon flash design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A coloured flash design on textured cream paper showing a black sleeve and cuff gripping a bundle of red-striped bacon rashers, with a small red anchor on the wrist. The words BRINGING HOME and THE BACON curve around the central motif in black script, and orange flames appear at the lower right edge. Bold black outlines and grey shading frame the flat red, green and orange fills.

Traditional Sleeve Cuff Anchor Flame Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Constance Liddell had seen a rasher since Madeira, and by the ninety-first day out of Bristol the men were eyeing the ship's cat the way a hungry man eyes a joint on a butcher's hook. Cook Amos Teague kept the last side of bacon in a sea-chest bolted under the galley table, lashed with tarred twine and sealed with a thumbprint of tallow, and he slept with the key on a bootlace round his neck.

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It was Jonah Mabry who went for it, on the middle watch, with his coat cuff buttoned tight against the spray and a red anchor pricked into his wrist the year before for luck. He had the lid up and three rashers in his fist when the lamp swung round the bulkhead and there stood Teague in his nightshirt, holding a marlinspike like a man who had buried a wife and kept her spoons.

'Bringing home the bacon, are you?' Teague said. 'Then you'll bring it home to the mast, because the captain's been wanting you since Tuesday.' Jonah expected the rope's end. Instead the captain himself came down the ladder, took one rasher from his fist, sniffed it and declared that the ship had run on hope and weevilled biscuit long enough. There were a dozen pans on the stove before the bell struck eight bells.

By dawn the galley chimney was smoking, the watch was cheering, and spitting pork fat had flared up the side of the stove and scorched Teague's book of accounts to black curls. He swore he would have Jonah's wages for it. Jonah said he had only fetched what was owed, and went back to his hammock smelling of smoke and feeling, for once, like a man who had come home with something.