Colour tattoo of the cartoon fish Dory above the words Just Keep Swimming in black lettering, on a forearm.

Dory with Just Keep Swimming lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows the blue tang fish Dory in profile, with yellow fins, a red-and-white eye and a yellow-tipped mouth, above the phrase JUST KEEP SWIMMING in tall black block lettering with light blue shading. The fish has smooth colour shading and bold black outlines, while the words are set in stacked and sweeping strokes that run diagonally along the lower edge. The photograph is taken straight on against blue and white striped fabric, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Fish Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boarding house at Little Morrow had nine rooms, a brass bell that stuck in wet weather, and a cellar that flooded every spring tide. Mrs Abernethy kept it going on stew and stubbornness. Under the end of the pier, where the drains ran out into the bay, lived a blue fish with yellow fins who could not remember anything for longer than it took to reach the next barnacle.

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One November the fish lost the way home. She had swum up the drain after a shrimp, and when the shrimp was gone, so was the water that had brought her in. She went round and round the pier legs, asking the mussels, asking the gulls, asking a bottle that had been lodged in the weed longer than anyone could say. The mussels said nothing. The gulls said her name was ugly. The bottle said, 'Keep swimming, love. The tide turns twice a day.'

So she kept swimming. She swam past the sea wall and the rusted winch, past the bathing huts with their doors painted like seaside rock, until the light went orange over the chimneys. Then she saw a yellow glow in a window above the water: Mrs Abernethy at the kitchen sink, rinsing a cup and humming the same verse she had hummed for forty years.

The fish did not know the tune, but she knew the window. Every night the landlady left the scullery grate open to the drain for the cats. The fish came up through it, slow and sideways, and lay in the cold bucket by the door until morning, when the bell rang and someone said, 'Well, look who's back.' Nobody ever asked where she had been. She never remembered to tell them.