Black lettering tattoo running vertically down the forearm of a person in a plaid blanket, with the small text set in a serif typeface.

Lettering quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a small block of black serif lettering tattooed vertically along the inner forearm, set in several short lines of text. The ink is solid black with crisp edges and no shading, and the arm is shown against a dark top and a red and black checked blanket. The composition is close and well lit, with the lettering as the clear focus.

Lettering Forearm Text Quote Serif lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on the flour sack, boy, and mind the kettle. You've been dropping things since Gravesend, and I've watched you do it, so let me tell you what I told the last one. Everything that falls on my deck belongs to me until I say otherwise.

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The Lydia Marr was a collier out of Hull, nineteen men and a cat called Admiral, and the galley was my kingdom in a box six feet square. One January gale, a ladle of Sheffield silver that was my mother's slid off the rack and went straight through the scuttle into the bilge. Old Hob the bosun wanted it written off. I wouldn't have it. I sent Tobias down the ladder with a lantern and a bucket, and every foul thing he brought up I made him scrub, the nails and buttons and the odd tooth along with it. I kept the lot in a biscuit tin on the top shelf, because a thing that falls isn't finished falling until somebody goes looking for it.

Four winters later we put in at Riga, and a chandler's boy came aboard with a barrow of oddments. There in the pile, bright as a new sixpence, was my ladle. Some dockhand had lifted it out of the harbour rubbish, the sea having given it up to the mud and the mud having given it up to the tide. I paid the boy in ship's biscuit and he thought he'd robbed me.

Tobias asked me what it meant, all that digging. I told him it meant nothing grander than a ladle. Hang it where the light catches it, I said, and rub it on your sleeve every morning. Whatever you lose down there is still down there somewhere, turning over in the dark, waiting for someone daft enough to look.