Close crop of a person in a navy swimsuit showing small cherry tattoos in red and green and black NO BIG lettering on the upper arm.

Cherries and NO BIG lettering on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A cropped photo of a person in a navy swimsuit with white floral print, showing tattoos on the upper arm and shoulder. The upper arm carries a small cherry pair in red and green with simple linework, alongside black lettering reading NO BIG. A figure-style design is partly visible on the shoulder, shaded in black and grey against a plain grey background.

Upper arm Cherry Lettering Text Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, the bench will hold you if you don't wriggle. You want to know why the cherry tree on Gull Hanley never fruited. I'll tell you, though my mother told it differently and she was right in her own way.

Keep reading

Years back, a man came off the Tuesday boat with a crate of saplings wrapped in wet sacking. Cherries, he said, dark red, the kind that stain your chin. Old Ada Penhale at the harbour shop wanted them for the wall of her yard. She paid him in tins of pilchards and a promise that he'd come back for the second crate. He never came back, and the sign he left nailed to her gate said NO BIG, painted by a man who'd run out of white. Nobody ever finished the sentence. Ada decided it meant the island was no big deal to anyone off the mainland, and she took it personally.

The trees grew anyway, two of them, stubborn as goats. Every June the children climbed them and came down with green cheeks and sour stomachs, and every June Ada stood at the gate reading that sign like a psalm. Her son went to sea. Her husband went to the churchyard. The boat stopped on Tuesdays, then Thursdays, then not at all.

When the last ferry was cancelled for good, Ada took the lettering brush from the shed and painted a pair of cherries beside the words, one red, one green, the way the tree looked in its second spring. Then she sat under the branches and waited for someone to ask. Nobody did, which is the island's way, but the tree gave fruit that year, and the sign still reads NO BIG, and that, I'm sorry to say, is as far as the story goes.