Fine line black script reading just keep swimming with a small anchor on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Just keep swimming script with anchor on shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a shoulder and upper back, with dark wavy hair falling over the neck and the face turned away from the camera. The tattoo reads just keep swimming in thin, flowing cursive script, with the descender of the g curling into a small fish shape and a fine line anchor to the right. The ink is a single dark tone on warm, softly lit skin against a plain pale background.

Fine line Lettering Shoulder Script Anchor Fish Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit down, you'll not hear it standing. Where was I? Ah, the Marguerite, three weeks out of Valparaiso with the hold full of nitrate and a mate who counted the biscuits twice a day. The night the anchor chain went over the side, Nessa Corrigan was the only one awake to see it. She didn't shout. She stood at the rail with her sleeves rolled and watched the links run out like a dropped rosary, then said, quite calm, 'Well, that's the anchor gone, so we'll have to keep moving.'

Keep reading

Her father had taught her the words the way some men teach a psalm. Whenever the sea turned cold or the cook turned cruel, he'd say it over his shoulder as he hauled on a line: just keep swimming. A line from a picture book about a blue fish, he said, and the sea doesn't care what you read at bedtime. She thought it daft at nine. At sixteen, on a dismasted barque with the glass falling, it was the only prayer she had.

Four days the wind held us off the Horn. The mate wanted the spare hawser cut for ballast, and Nessa talked him out of it, mostly by reminding him that a ship with nothing to hold onto goes wherever the current likes, and most currents like the rocks. We rigged a sea anchor from the hatch covers and somehow crawled north.

When we raised Falmouth the harbour master asked who'd brought her in. Nessa had already gone below to sleep. The mate pointed at the bowsprit cap, where someone had painted a small blue fish, its tail curled like the end of a letter. Nobody remembered doing it. I'd like to say it was Nessa's hand. Honest truth, I think it was the sea's.