Black and white photo of a fine serif lettering tattoo reading I am significant. on the upper back below the shoulder blade, with dark hair falling over the shoulder.

"I am significant" lettering on a shoulder blade

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the upper back of a person with the words I am significant. tattooed in a small, thin serif typeface across the skin near the shoulder blade. The lines are crisp and dark, with some softness from the fine detail, and the image is in black and white. The composition is close and off-centre, with dark hair falling over the right side of the frame and the text placed in the middle left.

Lettering Back Text Phrase Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The supply boat was three weeks late, so I was down to my last tin of paraffin and a box of tide tables nobody had asked for. Amos Vell, the keeper before me, had left a hand press in the store room under a tarpaulin gone stiff with salt. I cleaned the rollers for two days before I thought to look in the composing tray, where I found a single line of lead type set in a small serif, already locked in its chase: I am significant.

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Vell had printed it at the foot of every tide table he ever pulled, in the bottom margin where the fishermen's thumbs never reached. Forty years of slips, every one of them stamped with the same six words. I asked the wireless operator at Brackhaven whether anyone had ever mentioned it. He said the men called it Vell's Grace and used the tables to light their pipes.

I reset the chase that night and printed two hundred sheets by the lamp, my hands black to the wrist. When the boats came in through the grey on the Thursday, Tom Ashdown's boy rowed out with a sack of shrimp and asked for a table. I gave him one. He squinted at the margin, read it aloud slowly as if it were a bearing, and tucked it into his cap.

The lamp went round above me all that week, a white arm sweeping the water, and I counted its turns the way Vell must have counted his. Every morning I looked for the red sail coming in, and most mornings it came.