Pen sketch of a tattoo design showing a hand rising from ripples with a banner reading DON'T LET ME DROWN, in black and grey linework.

Hand rising from water with banner

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing in a open sketchbook shows a hand with long fingers rising from a circle of water ripples. A curled banner across the wrist reads DON'T LET ME DROWN in two lines of lettering. The linework is bold and mostly uncoloured, with hatched shading on the hand and water, and the design sits centred on the white page.

Traditional Lettering Hand Banner Water Lettering Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp above the coconut shy has been buzzing since Tuesday, and Ray says it will go when the generator does, which is to say never. You work the hook-a-duck stall at the end of the row, where the ground is always wet from the water tank that feeds the dunking booth. Nobody comes to the end of the row after dark. You have stopped asking why.

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The hand first came up on the third night, out of the tank behind the booth, pale fingers folding over the rim like someone checking the edge of a bath. You thought it was a prank from the lads on the waltzer. Then you saw the fingers were too long, the nails painted black, and the wrist was wrapped in a strip of paper that curled like a ribbon at a fete. The letters on it ran in two lines. DON'T LET ME DROWN, it said, in the old ornamented type they used on the boards outside the freak tent before the council closed it.

You tell yourself you are not the sort to be frightened by a sign. So on the fifth night you walk down to the tank with a torch, and the water is perfectly still, rings spreading out from the centre as though something just went under. Your reflection looks back at you. Beside it, faint and patient, another face is looking up from below. It is not drowning. It is waiting for you to pull the plug, and you find, very calmly, that you have your hand on the chain already.