Colour tattoo of a watercolour-style lion cub above the words Remember who you are in black script, on the ankle.

Lion cub and script on an ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A lion cub in a soft orange and yellow wash faces left with its tail raised, above a line of black cursive script reading Remember who you are. The cub has a watercolour look with blotchy, feathered edges and pale highlights, while the lettering has crisp, even linework. The photo is taken close up on the top of a pale foot against a dark sofa, with the design filling the centre of the frame.

Ankle Lion Lion cub Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are sixteen and sick as a dog on the third night out of Hull, wedged in a bunk on the Sorrel Star that smells of diesel and wet wool, when the bosun knocks and asks if you still have the drawing. You do. It lives folded in the inside pocket of your oilskin: a sheet torn from a school exercise book, a lion cub in orange and yellow wax crayon that your little sister Nell coloured on the kitchen floor the morning you left. Underneath, in pencil pressed so hard it dents the paper, she wrote the words she made you promise to read when the sea got bad.

Keep reading

The following afternoon a wave comes over the rail and sluices the galley passage. Your pocket is soaked through. You spread the sheet across the cook's steel table between the tea urn and the bread bin, and watch the cub bleed. Orange feathers out into the paper's grain like weather on a chart, the yellow pools at the edges, and the lion's tail dissolves into a smudge. The pencil holds, though, grey and stubborn, each letter still legible when you tilt it to the bulb.

Eamon Rusk, who has crossed this route forty times and never once been sick, leans in the doorway with a mug of stewed tea. He doesn't offer comfort. He takes the sheet by its corners, holds it up like a ship's manifest, and says the Atlantic has never cared what a boy feels, so the boy had better care what he carries. Then he pins it with a drawing pin to the bulkhead above the kettle, where the damp can get at it, and goes back up on deck.

At Cape Town you peel it off the wall, stiff and tide-stained, and fold it back into your pocket. The cub is pale now, nearly ghosted into the paper, but its head still turns left and its tail still stands up like a question. You read the pencil line aloud on the quay, to nobody in particular, and the gulls take no notice.