Black and white traditional-style dagger design with three banners reading WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE SCARY MOVIE, shown as a sticker on a wooden surface.

Dagger and banner with scary movie lettering

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A dagger with a long, curved blade and a pommel at the top of its hilt is wrapped by four banner scrolls. The banners carry the words WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE SCARY MOVIE? in block capitals, and the blade and hilt are rendered with fine stippled shading. The design is printed in black ink on white, shown as a die-cut sticker against pale wood.

Traditional Lettering Dagger Knife Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The question came up somewhere past the Dogger Bank, when the wind dropped and the net was still hours from the winch. Cal Mortimer had been chewing the same pilchard sandwich since Hull, and Dennis the cook asked it the way a man asks for the salt: what's your favourite scary movie? Nobody on the Sea Hawk had ever sat through a horror film except Dennis, who had watched one in a Grimsby flat in 1987 and never quite recovered.

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Cal said he didn't do scary. He did the four o'clock shift and the gutting table, which was plenty. Dennis rapped the blade of his filleting knife against the rail, and the skipper looked up from the wheelhouse window and mouthed something rude. "Everyone's got one," Dennis said. "Even you."

So Cal, to end it, named the one he'd caught on his nan's telly, a black and white thing about a lighthouse keeper who kept a stuffed gull on the kitchen dresser and talked to it at teatime. Dennis said that wasn't scary, that was sad. Cal agreed. They argued the point until the net came up heavy with dogfish and the question was forgotten.

Later, hosing down the table, Cal found a crumpled cinema ticket in his oilskin pocket, the Bridlington picture house long since shut. He turned it over. Someone had pencilled a single word on the back in careful capitals: AGAIN. He could not for the life of him remember who had written it, so he slipped the ticket back into the pocket, over his heart, and reached for the next fish.