Hand-drawn tattoo design of two lungs and a trachea with stippled dotwork and watercolour-style washes, with the words Need you like water in my lungs above and below.

Lungs with lettering design

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A drawing of a pair of lungs joined to a ribbed trachea, with the words NEED YOU LIKE above and WATER IN MY LUNGS below in hand-drawn lettering. The black linework is accompanied by soft peach, brown and grey washes and clusters of stippled dots around the lungs. The design sits centred on a plain cream background.

Dotwork Lettering Water Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Tennant had counted the boats in off the harbour wall for thirty-one years, and she knew by the colour of the tide when one was not coming. The Ardent rounded the breakwater at dusk with her wheelhouse lamp still burning and nobody at the wheel. Her skipper's boy, Callum Reid, was found three miles out, tangled in the lines, his chest full of brine.

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The doctor at the cottage hospital called it drowning, though the word sat badly in the room. The water had come into him the way the tide fills a rock pool, quietly and from every side, until there was no air left to hold. Mags kept his sea boots by the range and would not let anyone move them. The women in the shop stopped asking her how she was getting on and started asking her what she was eating.

Clearing his bunk a fortnight later, she found a sheet torn from the tide almanac. On the back, in pencil pressed so hard it dented the paper, he had written a line that did not scan and did not need to: need you like water in my lungs. The hand was careless and cheerful, the hand of a lad who thought he had years to tidy his sentences. She folded it into her purse behind a ferry ticket they had never used.

Now she walks the slip each evening at the turn of the tide. She breathes in until her ribs ache, the cold air thick with salt and diesel, and holds it. Then she lets it go out over the water, slow, the way he used to whistle through his teeth, as if she could give some of it back.