Traditional style tattoo on the upper arm showing a white goose and yellow chick above a steaming teacup, with the word PIVOT and red flowers below.

Goose and chick above a teacup on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A white goose and a yellow chick sit above a teacup with curling steam, and the word PIVOT is written across the steam. Red and green flowers sit at the base of the cup. The bold black outlines and flat fills of colour are typical of traditional tattooing, and the composition is centred on the upper arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The goose came aboard at Liverpool in a wicker hamper marked for the captain's wife, and by the time we cleared the Mersey she had claimed the galley stove as her own. Cook said nobody argued with a goose on a range, and she was right. The chick came later, hatched in a bread bin from an egg the second mate had been meaning to throw overboard, and it followed her everywhere, peeping at the kettle as though it were the sun.

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Off the Azores the wind backed sharp and the mainsail cracked like a pistol. The mate bellowed for a pivot, a turn on the spot to bring her head round through the eye of the squall, and the word went down the deck faster than any of us could move. I was on the wheel, so I missed the best of it. Cook told me afterwards that the goose stood on the rim of a steaming teacup, flapped once, and the chick chirped the order back at him. Every hand on the ropes swore it was the chick who gave the call.

We came through with the sails in ribbons and a fair wind behind us. The captain's wife never got her goose back, and nobody asked her to. Each morning after that the galley smelled of tea and burnt toast, and the steam curled up past the porthole in the shapes of the two birds, one white and one yellow, the pair of them watching the horizon as if they had charted it themselves.

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