Black and grey traditional coffin tattoo reading SOONER THAN YOU THINK, with flowers and dotwork shading, on the calf.

Coffin with flowers on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A coffin sits at the centre of the design, with the words SOONER THAN YOU THINK lettered across its body and a small cross-like mark below. Bold black outlines frame the coffin and two flower heads, with a flower at the base and leaves curving up the sides. The coffin and leaves are shaded with stippled dotwork in grey, and green and red leaves from another tattoo are partly visible at the top of the frame.

Traditional Dotwork Calf Coffin Flower Leaves Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mate, Dunstan Hobb, had been ribbing me since Gravesend about my bread. He said I baked it so heavy it would sink the schooner and be buried with the crew. I kept my temper over the stove and my knife in the flour, which is how a cook survives a forecastle of forty men.

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The third morning out of Whitby, I took a offcut of cedar from the spare hatch board and whittled it into a coffin, the long hexagonal kind the undertakers favour. I pinned it to the galley door with four brass tacks. Then, because a joke is only worth telling if it is done properly, I burned three words into the lid with the poker: SOONER THAN YOU THINK. Beneath them I scorched a small cross that looked more like a fish hook. Hobb saw it at the change of watch and went the colour of suet.

For a week he would not come past that door. The men took to leaving flowers on the sill, a sprig of sea pink from the Dogger ground, a twist of pressed campion, which I did not put there and did not stop. The mate began to sleep with his boots on. On the eighth night the weather came down hard and the main sheet parted, and it was Hobb who went over the rail to fetch the boom back in.

We hauled him aboard by the collar with a line round his chest, coughing salt and swearing like a man newly born. He did not thank me, and he never mentioned the coffin again. The next morning the board was gone from my door, and in its place a single loaf sat on the sill, risen high as a man's hat and scored across the top in the neat cuts of a hand that was not mine. Beside it lay a sprig of sea pink, and I have kept it pressed in my Bible ever since.