Chest tattoo of a red heart with grey crossed bones and the script words Beautiful Tragedy running across the upper chest, in a lettering style with soft shading.

Heart and crossed bones with script on chest

Lettering · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of an upper chest with a tattoo of the words Beautiful Tragedy in black script arcing across the collarbones. Centred beneath the lettering is a red heart with grey crossed bones laid over it, with soft grey shading on the bones and a pale diagonal highlight across the heart. A pink towel sits at the left edge of the frame, and the subject's face is cropped out above the chin.

Lettering Chest Script Heart Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The men of Skerrow Haven had a saying that the sea took what it was owed and not a fathom more. When the Gull Bright went out in February with Ada Mollison's husband aboard, the glass fell so fast that the lifeboat could not follow past the Stacks. Ada did not weep on the quay. She walked home, scrubbed the salt from her step, and then went to the chandler's for a tin of red paint and a brush with a worn handle.

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The next spring she bought the skiff old Rennick had given up on, paid for it with the herring money, and painted a heart on her bow. Beneath it she laid two bones from a drowned ewe, crossed and fixed with tar. The fishermen laughed at her in the harbour. Then she came back each evening with a full creel while their own boats sat low in the water, and they stopped laughing. Hobb Tennant, who was the oldest of them, said the sea respects a thing that admits what it is.

She wrote the name under the heart in careful script, the way her husband had written his letters home from the mainland. Beautiful Tragedy, it read, because he had always said the sea was both, and she had never found a better word for it.

Every dawn after that, the gulls wheeled over the bow before anyone else was awake, and Ada rowed out past the Stacks with the paint still bright on the wood.