Two matching thigh tattoos with black lines and lettering reading Goodnight nobody and Goodnight mush, the second beside a coloured bowl with a spoon.

Matching thigh tattoos: Goodnight nobody and a bowl

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two tattoos sit on the upper thighs of a person, each framed by a pair of thin black horizontal lines. The left thigh has black script reading Goodnight nobody, while the right has the words Goodnight mush beside a shaded red bowl with a spoon resting in it. The lettering is solid black and the bowl uses red with grey shading, set against plain skin.

Lettering Thigh Text Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the ring, the lights went amber at nine, and the children said goodnight to whatever was listening. Tove's mother had taught her the old words the way other families taught knots: goodnight nobody for the empty corridor past the hatch, where no one walked after the shift bells, and goodnight mush for the galley wall, where the porridge synth hummed behind its panel and dispensed a grey, faintly sweet bowl on demand.

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Tove and her cousin Wren had both been eight when they decided that paper got lost on a ship and skin did not, so they carried the rhyme on their thighs in black letters, each set between two ruled lines like the margins of a school exercise book. Wren's side had the nobody line. Tove's had the bowl, which the infirmary artist had shaded in red and grey until it looked almost warm enough to steam.

The refit came in the spring. Wren's family was moved down to the lower spokes, and the galley synth was pulled for scrap to make room for a water reclaimer. On her first night alone, Tove went up to the galley, pressed her palm to the blank panel and said goodnight mush to a wall that said nothing back. Then she noticed a bowl on the counter, cold and lumpy, with a spoon standing upright in it. Taped to the rim was a strip of flimsy in Wren's cramped hand: Nobody answered, so I did.

She ate it standing up, all of it, the way they used to on the bench. Then she turned down the corridor, looked at the dark where nobody walked, and said goodnight nobody. Far down the ring, one by one, the amber lights along the spoke went out, and a single one stayed lit at the lower hatch, as if someone had been waiting to answer.