Black dotwork and linework tattoo on a person's upper back showing a circular emblem with the numerals 042 inside a ring of angular script, with a small ornamental chain running up the spine.

Circular script emblem on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black tattoo across the upper back shows a central circular emblem with three ring motifs and the numerals 042 set in the middle. A ring of angular script surrounds the emblem, and the surrounding area is filled with stippled dotwork texture. A vertical chain of small ornaments descends from the neck toward the emblem along the spine, and the image is a close, straight-on view of the back.

Dotwork Lettering Back Emblem Circle Numeral Script Ornament Chain Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Halsey Cove could read the ring of letters round Dad's strongbox, and he liked it that way. He had bought the box off a widow in 1961 for four pounds and a sack of pilchards, and its lid carried three brass dials stacked like the wheels of a pram. Each dial was scored with spirals, and the numbers 0 4 2 sat in the middle, rubbed smooth by a lifetime of thumbs.

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The winter I turned seventeen, Dad's hands shook too much to hold a pen, and the harbour master wanted the slipway deeds by Friday. So I sat up three nights at the kitchen table with stewed tea and a stub of carpenter's pencil, turning each ring one notch at a time and writing every failure in the margin of an old tide table. Gulls argued on the roof. Past midnight the lighthouse beam swept the window, and I noticed the scratches on the wheels were not random. They were arcs, each one the length of a tide's turn.

I laid the tide table beside the box. The angular letters round the rim, which I had always taken for decoration, matched the names of the sandbars in the margins. I set the dials to the first low water of the year, then the next, then the next, until the rings stopped grinding and the lid lifted with a sigh like a sail going slack.

Inside were no deeds. There was only a folded chart of the channel, every rock and gully inked in Dad's careful capitals, and beneath it a note in his handwriting: Go out on the ebb, come back on the flood. Mind the 042. I laughed until I cried, then carried the chart down to the slip, where the water was just beginning to turn.