Close photo of a thin black script tattoo reading 'i am because you were' on a person's upper back below the shoulder blade, in a fine line lettering style.

Fine script phrase across a shoulder blade

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows a back with a tattoo of the lowercase phrase 'i am because you were' written in thin black handwritten-style script across the upper back near the shoulder blade. The linework is fine and even, with no shading or added colour. The warm orange tone of the image and the dark vignette around the edges frame the text in the centre.

Lettering Fine line Back Phrase Script Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your mam says you have been asking about the boat, so I am putting this in the tin with the ration books, where you will find it when you are grown and too clever to need me. The Marigold went down off Scarrow Point in the winter of 1947 with my father aboard and nobody to blame but the weather and a cracked hawser. Ma never let the words go, though. Every time the gulls came screaming over the slip she would stand at the sink and say them under her breath, as if she were checking the tide: I am because you were.

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I thought it was grief talking. I was twelve and wanted to know why she couldn't just put the kettle on. Then the lifeboat crew came up the hill with a wet canvas bag, and inside was my father's knitted cap, and a paper twist of pear drops he had bought for me and never managed to give over. Ma sat on the step with the cap in her lap for an hour. She was not weeping. She was counting the stitches, her lips moving the way they had at the sink.

So when I fell out with the cannery and went off to Plymouth on the milk train, I took that sentence with me like a spare key. It has got me through a fair few bad landlords and one very bad husband. Your great-grandfather's name is scratched on the inside of a locker door at Scarrow, if you ever go looking, because the words were his before they were hers. Keep the tin dry, love. Nan.