Black and white photo of a fine line script lettering tattoo with a small dot above it, on the inner forearm.

Fine line script lettering on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a thin, single-line script wording tattooed on the inner forearm, with a small dot placed above the lettering. The linework is delicate and even, with a few loops and flourishes, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The image is in black and white, and the tattoo sits centrally against soft skin, with a pale fabric sleeve at the top edge and a dark background to the right.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, and mind the peat smoke in your eyes. This is the one about Ewan Tallack and the herring that would not come in. You'll hear people say the sea takes what it wants, but my grandmother said the sea only takes what you're fool enough to hold on to, and Ewan was a fool of the first water.

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Every autumn he went out past the Skerry in his brother's boat, and every autumn the nets came up light. Other men cursed. Ewan just sat on the thwart, rolled a cigarette he never lit, and said, so it goes. He said it to the gulls, to the minister, to his wife when she asked for the rent money. It drove her half mad. She said a man who shrugs at the sea will drown in it one day, and he laughed and said the sea had been drowning him for thirty years and he was still here to be annoyed about it.

Then came the winter the boat did not come back. The brother found it turned over in the bay with the oars still lashed. They searched the caves until the tide made them stop. That spring his wife walked down to the shore with a pen borrowed from the schoolmaster and wrote the words on the back of a fish crate, the way he always said them, the loops wandering like a wet rope. She never got the tail of the phrase right, my grandmother said, but she kept trying.

When the herring came back that summer, thick as thunder, the old men said the sea had been paid. I don't believe that. I believe Ewan's wife set a single black dot above the words, the way a schoolmaster marks a thing finished, then went home and cooked the first catch for her neighbours. That's the story. So it goes.