Fine line black ink tattoo of a cartoon creature above the line 'A person's a person, no matter how small' on the lower back.

Cartoon creature and quote on the lower back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black outline drawing of a cartoon creature with floppy ears and a long snout sits above a short printed quotation in small serif-style lettering. The linework is clean and unshaded, with no colour or fill. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against smooth skin, with a dim background of shelves and objects.

Fine line Back Quote Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the island of Gorrow, the sea came up the cliff path every spring and left the wells full of salt. The people there kept a grey beast called Mossback, who had ears like wet sails and a nose that could find a fish under three fathoms of kelp. Nobody thought much about him until the autumn the fishwives began counting their children against the harbour wall and finding one short.

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Old Sefa, who rang the bell at the chapel, said the missing child was no more than a thumb's width of a girl, and that gulls had carried her off. The council argued for a week. Some said let the gulls keep her. Mossback said nothing. He lowered his great head and sniffed along the shingle until he came to a limpet shell, pale as a fingernail, with a thin voice coming out of it, asking whether anyone was there.

He carried the shell in the folds of his ear all the way up to the chapel steps. The council gasped and shut their doors. "It is only a shell," they said. "It is a someone," Mossback answered, in the slow way beasts speak once they have decided something, "and a someone is owed the same ground as the rest of us." He set the shell down on the bell rope where it could be heard, and waited, the way he waited for the tide.

The girl was fetched from a crack in the wall where the gulls had left her, and by evening the bell rang out across Gorrow as it had never rung before, small and clear, loud enough for everyone to hear that the smallest voice on the island still counted. Mossback walked home along the cliff with his ears low, pleased in the plain way of old animals. Nobody on Gorrow counted the children against the wall again without counting the grey beast at the end of the line.