Close photo of a small black lettering tattoo reading EVERY DROP COUNTS with a tiny blue water drop, on the inner wrist and forearm.

Every drop counts lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A hand is raised with the wrist turned toward the camera, showing a small tattoo of three stacked black capital words reading EVERY DROP COUNTS. A tiny light blue water drop sits beneath the last word. The lettering is crisp and evenly weighted against plain pale skin, with a soft blurred background.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Text Wrist

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, We have been becalmed nineteen days south of the Line, and the sea lies flat as a slate roof with not a cat's paw of wind on it. The Serena Mabry creaks at her hawsers all night like an old woman turning in bed. Mr Harrow the mate measures the water himself at the scuttle with a brass cup, a half pint at dawn and the same at dusk, and he has had words stencilled above the butt in white letters: EVERY DROP COUNTS. Beneath them the carpenter, who has no patience for sentiment, dabbed a single blue drop with his thumb. He said the words looked lonely without something to point at.

Keep reading

Yesterday the cook's boy caught his heel on a ring bolt and the cask went over. A pint ran across the deck and dropped through the scupper into the sea. The boy went the colour of tallow and waited for the blow. Harrow didn't shout. He knelt in the wet, wet his finger in the last puddle, held it up to the sun as though it might say something, and then put the boy's hand in his own and pressed the finger to the boy's lips. Nobody laughed. Nobody needed to.

I have kept my cup back all week, a mouthful at a time, and I mean to post it to you in a stoppered bottle if the wind ever comes to take us home. Silly, I know. I expect it will only tell the fish that Tom is a fool.

The rain came at four bells this morning, grey and heavy as wet wool. Every man aboard turned his face up and opened his mouth like a fledgling, and the boy stood in the middle of the deck with his arms out, laughing until he coughed. I thought of the words over the cask and how they were never really about the water. Then I thought of you, and kept my face to the sky until it stopped.

Mind you drink yours, Nell. Your loving brother, Tom