Thin black capital lettering reading EXCELSIOR on the wrist above a hand with blue painted nails, set against a pale turquoise background.

Excelsior lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand and wrist showing the word EXCELSIOR in thin, uniform black capital letters with a condensed sans-serif form. The lines are fine and even, and the text runs across the wrist at a slight upward angle. The ink is pure black on pale skin, and the plain turquoise backdrop keeps the focus on the lettering and the hand.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marguerite,

Keep reading

The purser has finally stopped locking the chart room, so I can tell you what the gulls did to the bread crumbs this morning. They fought over every last one and then one of them flew off with the whole loaf, which the cook says is the closest thing to a mutiny we have had since Gibraltar. I am writing this at the rail with the ink bottle wedged between my knees, because the captain has sworn the lamp in the saloon is needed for the stewards.

You will want to know about the word on the chart. Mr Ashdown, the second mate, painted it on the board above the companionway the night we cleared the Channel, in letters so thin they look like pencil. He says it is Latin for higher, and that it was the motto of a school in Leeds where he was once a very unhappy boy. I told him the sea does not read Latin. He told me the sea does not read anything, which is why it needs a board with a word on it to remind the men what they are for.

Yesterday the fog came down so thick that the bowsprit vanished, and we steered by the sound of the bell and the single word I could just make out, painted in those narrow black strokes, when the lantern caught it. Ashdown stood beside me with his hand flat on the rail and said nothing at all for an hour. When the fog lifted at dawn, the coast was exactly where the chart said it would be, and he laughed like a boy, and then he went below and scrubbed the board clean with his sleeve.

He has promised to paint it again when we reach Valparaíso. I have told him I will hold the brush.

Yours in salt and ink, Henry

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