Black and grey tattoo of four teeth in a row across a forearm, with shaded roots and outlined crowns.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four teeth on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Four teeth are tattooed in a row across the skin, two narrow front teeth on the left and two larger back teeth on the right. The linework is dark and outlined, with grey shading along the edges and inside the crowns and roots. The teeth sit against plain skin with a blurred wooden background at the top of the frame.

Forearm Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pascoe never once asked me to hurry, which is why I let him sit on the coal sacks with his jaw wrapped in a rag while the Irish Mary rolled under us in the Bay of Biscay. The galley was the only warm room aft, so the men came to me when a tooth went bad. I was the nearest thing the Mary had to a surgeon: a cook with a pair of pincers and a bottle of rum I was not supposed to open.

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I kept the teeth in a tobacco tin on the shelf above the flour. Each one went into a twist of paper with a name and a date pencilled on it, because the captain liked a record and I liked knowing who had been brave. The front teeth came easily, the narrow ones that snapped like ship's biscuit. The back teeth fought. They were long in the root and yellow at the neck, and they came out with a crack you felt in your own wrists.

The night the Mary lost her foremast, Pascoe came down with his cheek swollen to the eye. He had a molar gone grey at the root, the kind that had been rotting a year and would not be told. I got it out by lamplight while the timbers groaned above us. When I held it up for him to see, he laughed through the rag and said I ought to put it in the tin with the others, since he had never once been the first to leave anything behind on a ship. I wrapped it, wrote his name on the paper, and put it on the shelf.

Years later I was ashore in Cork with the tin under my arm, meaning to give it to his widow. She opened it on her doorstep, read the twist of paper with his name, and shut the lid without a word. The next morning the tin was back on my step with a biscuit inside.