Black line tattoo of a chemical structure formula running across the top of a foot and onto the ankle.

Chemical structure formula across a foot

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A chemical structural formula, drawn as connected black lines with bonds, letters and small labels such as NH2 and OH, runs diagonally across the top of a foot from the ankle to the toes. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the lettering is clear and set at small scale. The design is shown in black ink on pale skin against a light blue-grey background, with the foot filling most of the frame.

Fine line Ankle Other Chemical structure Molecule Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had run in the damp of the Cape Horn passage, so Dr Hollis Finch copied the chain again by lamplight, bond by bond, the way his old master had taught him to copy a prescription: slowly, and without trusting his memory. Nine links, a sulphur bridge pinched between two of them like a knot in a bowline, and a ring at the far end that the old man had labelled OH as though it were a tavern sign. Nobody aboard could tell him what it made.

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The Marguerite had been out of Valparaíso for thirty-one days with a cargo of nitrate and a cook who would not touch the salt pork. Two of the stokers had gone yellow and quiet. The chest in the dispensary held twelve sealed bottles, and the letter wrapped round them had come from Dr Ambrose Vell, who had died of a fever in Callao with his notebooks still open on the desk.

Finch set the drawing on the scrubbed table and walked his finger along it the way a man reads a hymn he half remembers. Amide, amide, a loop of proline like a fist closing, the sulphur, then the ring. The bottles were numbered in Vell's cramped hand, one to twelve, but out of order, and it took him until the middle watch to see that the numbers were not a sequence at all. They were a count of links, read from the first ring to the last.

At four bells he woke the stoker, Tomas Reyes, who had been staring at the deckhead for two days, and measured out the first dose with a brass spoon. Tomas swallowed it and asked whether the sea would ever stop smelling of nitrate. Finch said he did not know. It was the first true thing he had said aboard in a month, and he wrote it in the margin of Vell's drawing, beside the ring labelled OH, as the only fact he could be certain of.