Two women seen from behind, one with the word DUDE in black blackletter script across her upper back, the other with sweet in black script above her shoulder blade and a colour lily tattoo on her

Dude and sweet lettering with a lily on two backs

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

Two women with their backs to the camera wear black vest tops. The woman on the left has the word DUDE in solid black blackletter-style lettering across her upper back, while the woman on the right has sweet in similar black lettering above her shoulder blade and a lily with green leaves on her shoulder. The lettering is crisp and solid, and the lily uses pale pink and white petals with soft green shading, set against warm skin in an indoor setting.

Lettering Botanical Back Shoulder Lettering Lily Flower Leaves Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the ship's language before you learn the rigging. On the Halcyon Vesper, out of Hull for the Canaries, the deckhands greet everyone as dude, a word the cook picked up from a Glasgow stevedore and passed round like a bad cold. You answer to it, because nobody on a fourteen-day crossing bothers with names twice.

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Between the two of you there is a bet. Old Ferris swears a sailor's word should be either a blessing or a curse, nothing in between. He says sweet is the only thing worth saying about the sea when the sea is behaving, and you have never once heard him say it. The lily in the wardroom has been dying since Biscay, its petals browning at the edges, and you keep it alive with water from the galley tap poured into a tin cup.

Off the Cape Verde Islands the swell lifts and drops the bow, and a boy from Lisbon slips on the wet forward hatch. You reach him first, hauling him back by the collar while the mate bellows from the bridge. He is breathing, grinning through a split lip, saying dude, dude, as if it is the only word he has left. You laugh until your ribs ache, and he laughs too, and for a minute the whole ship seems to be laughing with you.

At the quay in Las Palmas, Ferris presses the wilted lily into your palm and says it is yours now, the only sweet thing aboard. You tuck the stem behind your cap band and walk down the gangway into the heat, already wondering which ship leaves next and who will need someone to call them dude.