Close side view of a fine line black script tattoo on a hip, partly above black lace underwear, with a navel piercing visible.

Cursive script line on a hip

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A side view of a torso shows a single line of black cursive script on the hip, just above a black lace waistband. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the lettering is only partly legible in this low light. The image is in black and grey on a dark, warm-toned background, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Fine line Lettering Other Script Word Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan wrote everything in the same brown ink, pressing so hard the nib caught on the paper. By the time I was nine I could read her hand better than my own, which was how I knew the note under the fruit bowl was serious. It said I was not to go down to the harbour wall on my own, and under that, in the loops she used only for things she meant, a second line: Because I say so.

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I was a bad reader of instructions and a worse reader of tides. The wall was where the boats came in at four, when Dennis Crowe unloaded crates of mackerel that smelled like pennies, and where the lads from the chandlery sat with their feet dangling over the green water. I went down anyway, the way children do, and that afternoon the wind swung round and the slipway went under before I had finished watching a gull fight a crust.

Nan did not shout. She sat me at the kitchen table, dried my shoes on the range rail and took out the ink. "You're not in trouble for going," she said. "You're in trouble for thinking I'd not notice." She wrote the phrase on the back of a seed packet and pushed it over, and I copied it letter by letter until my wrist ached and the loops came out nearly hers.

Years later, when she had gone and the flat above the chandlery was let to strangers, I found the seed packet in a drawer. The ink had faded to the colour of weak tea, but the line was still there, and I understood then that she had never meant the order at all. She had meant: come back up the steps before the tide does.