Black and grey tattoo of a cigarette with rising smoke wisps on the lower leg, shown on hairy skin.

Cigarette with smoke on a lower leg

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a cigarette lies horizontally across the leg, with its filter end shaded in a cross-hatched pattern. Two thin, wavy black lines rise vertically above it to suggest smoke. The fine linework and soft grey shading are shown in a close, slightly angled photograph against a plain background.

Calf Cigarette Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the Ellen Shore lost her steering off Flamborough Head, the rest of the fleet had already turned for home without you, and the only thing left in your oilskin pocket was one hand-rolled cigarette and a matchbox with four matches in it. Dougie Fenn, the young deckhand, told you that was bad luck. You told him the bad luck had been the steering cable, then struck a match anyway and cupped the flame in both hands against a wind that wanted it out.

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The smoke did not drift the way it should have. With the engine dead and the swell lifting the hull slow and heavy, the air above the deck stood still, and a single grey thread climbed straight up past the wheelhouse rail as if it had somewhere particular to be. Dougie watched it instead of the sea. He had never been out in a boat that wasn't moving, and he kept asking when the tow would come, whether his mother would hear on the wireless, whether the cigarette would last.

It lasted longer than it should have. You smoked it down to a stub the length of a thumbnail, while the radio crackled with Harry Lowe's voice from the Margaret Rose, saying he had a line on its way across the water from the south. When the tow rope finally came snaking over the swell, you pinched the ember out and tucked the stub into the tin with the others, saving it for a night you hadn't yet decided would come.