A coloured flash design of a cartoon lemon with a grumpy expression, a dark collar and leaves, framed by a cream banner reading 'When life gives you lemons' and 'HMMN YAAAGH'.

Lemon character with banner lettering

Colour · Flash

A cartoon lemon with half-closed eyes, a pointed nose and a dark collared top sits in the centre of a red and orange circular background. A cream scroll banner curls around it with the lettering 'When life gives you lemons' across the top and 'HMMN YAAAGH' along the bottom, with green leaves, white blossoms and small lemons decorating the edges. The bold black outlines and flat fills of yellow, green and grey give it a playful, illustrated finish.

Banner Leaves Blossom Scroll Lettering Character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook Obadiah Pruett had been promised a hundred lemons for the Marigold's run to Valparaíso, and what came aboard at Falmouth was a crate of the sourest, most sulky fruit he had ever lifted. They lay in the straw with their eyes half shut, as if the whole voyage was an insult they had decided to outlast.

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By the third week scurvy had got into the forecastle, and the captain stood over the galley stove with his hat crushed in one fist and asked whether the lemons were ready. Pruett took the nearest one down and sliced it open on the board. It stared up at him, pinched about the nose, and said nothing at all, which was worse than any complaint. He squeezed the lot into the grog barrel, and the men drank it down with faces like wet boots, grumbling into their tin cups.

The ship's boy, Tobias, asked what the crew was saying, and Pruett told him it was only the usual noise a man makes when he is being made healthy against his will. Tobias listened for a while, then repeated the sound back in a deep, put-upon drawl, and the whole mess deck laughed until the bosun banged a ladle on the bulkhead.

That night Pruett wrote in the log that the stores had been received in good order and that the lemons had been issued as directed. Under remarks he hesitated, pen above the page, then wrote: attitude unchanged. Nobody aboard the Marigold ever lost their teeth to the scurvy again, and every man of them, when he thought no one was looking, pulled a face like a lemon and gave a long, weary groan.