Two people seen from behind, each with a black script lettering tattoo across the shoulder blade, one reading about an anchor and the other about wings.

Matching script quotes on two shoulders

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two people are seen from behind, sitting outdoors, with their backs and shoulders in the frame. Each shoulder carries a black script lettering tattoo of a line of text, one reading about an anchor and the other about wings and clouds. The linework is crisp and even, with the ink solid black and no shading, and the skin tones and yellow and white clothing are natural. The composition places the two tattoos side by side across the centre of the frame.

Lettering Shoulder Anchor Wing Cloud Quote Script text Two people

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull that stool nearer, the one with all its legs, and listen, because I'll not tell it twice on a night like this. The Marguerite Hale left Hull with forty-one souls aboard and a hold full of rail iron, and two cousins in her: Nell Crabtree, who could splice a hawser blindfold, and Ada Crabtree, who could not be kept off the yards for love nor money.

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Off the Horn the sea got up like a bad-tempered bullock. The mainsail split at four bells in the middle watch, and Ada went aloft in the dark with a lantern clamped in her teeth. Nell went after her, not because she was told to, but because somebody had to stand under the ratlines and hold the other end of the lifeline. Ada's boot slipped on the wet rope. The cook heard the crack and the shouting from his galley and came up the companionway with his apron still on.

Nell held. Her palms went raw as butcher's meat, and she did not let go, not for the bosun's roaring nor the bell going mad above them. When Ada came down the shrouds with blood on her knuckles and her grin still on, Nell said only, 'You'll mind the anchor next time, my girl.' And Ada said, 'Then you'll mind the sky,' and that was the whole bargain, the way sisters make it.

Back in Hull they walked to the parlour of a man called Pim, who did lettering for the chapel and for sailors' tattoos on a Saturday. The cook, who had the best hand aboard, wrote the lines out on brown paper first, and Pim pricked them across the two shoulders the week before the next sailing. Folk said it was daft. I say look at how the pair of them held their heads, and then tell me which one of them was the anchor.