Traditional colour tattoo of a cherry pie slice topped with whipped cream, set inside a circle on a calf, with the letters RR beneath.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry pie slice on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A slice of cherry pie topped with a swirl of whipped cream sits inside a grey circular frame, with the letters RR in red below it. The linework is bold and dark, with flat solid fills in red, cream, tan and grey. The photo is taken indoors against a tiled floor, with the tattoo centred on the lower leg.

Traditional Calf Initial Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Rosalind,

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The cherries in this pie are tinned, so you can tell your mother the Atlantic has done its worst to my pastry but not to my reputation. Cook says a pie is only as good as the cream on top, and I have been whipping tins of evaporated milk with a fork for three days because the mixer went over the side off Cape Verde. The cream stands up if you're patient and the tin is cold, which is the only lesson I have learnt at sea that I could not have got from a book.

The captain ate two slices on Sunday without looking up from his charts. Afterwards the second mate asked me, quite seriously, whether the red stuff was cherry or something I had found in the hold. I said it was cherry, and that I'd know, because I had stoned every one of them myself with a hairpin and a bucket of brine.

Your last letter said the bakery on Mill Lane has a new girl who stacks the buns like a pagoda. I laughed for a good ten minutes on the poop deck. Tell her there is no pagoda here, only a tin of flour that the weevils have claimed as a parish.

We raise Freetown on Thursday, if the wind holds. When I come off the gangway I will bring you a proper slice from a proper oven, and you can judge the cream for yourself. If it has slumped, I will confess and never bake for you again. If it has held, you will have to marry me out of sheer gratitude.

Yours, with flour on both sleeves, Tom