Black and grey tattoo of two footprints beside ornate script lettering with flourishes on a forearm.

Footprints and script lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A collage of three photographs of a tattoo on the inner forearm, showing two shaded footprints with toes beside large looping script lettering. The linework is bold and black with soft grey wash shading inside the footprints, and fine swirling flourishes run along the base of the lettering. The three views show the same piece from different angles against a wooden floor.

Lettering Forearm Footprint Script Lettering Flourish Toe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the galley of the herring boat Gannet, the cook kept a sack of flour under the bench and a rule about it. Any boy who came aboard barefoot had to cross the floor once, heel to toe, so the flour took his prints. Then she would look at them and say which way the sea would take him. Nobody believed her, but nobody skipped the crossing either.

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Tobin came aboard the spring he turned eleven, thin as a boathook, and walked the floor with his toes curled like a crab's. Mrs Harkness studied the marks a long while. Two feet, she said, and one of them had been stepping out for somewhere else already. She swept the floor clean with the flat of her hand and said nothing more about it.

The weeks went by. The Gannet worked the grounds off the north coast, and the boy learned knots, gutting, and how to keep his mouth shut in a blow. Then one October night the wind backed hard and the cook was thrown against the range. Tobin found her with a split lip and a cut on her foot, bleeding onto the flour he had not yet swept. Her prints ran beside his in the white dust, one stride after another, all the way to the hatch.

When the boat limped in at dawn, the harbourmaster asked who had kept the galley lamp lit. Tobin said the cook had. Mrs Harkness said nothing, but she left the flour unswept for a month, and every boy who came aboard after that walked across it while she read their feet like weather.