Black script reading Mischief Managed with a trail of black footprints running down the side of a ribcage, in a lettering style.

Mischief Managed script and footprints on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A side view of a torso shows a black calligraphic script reading Mischief Managed, set on a diagonal from the upper ribs. A trail of solid black footprints runs downwards from beneath the lettering towards the hip. The ink is black only, with clean edges on the script and footprints against plain pale skin, and the background is a softly lit room.

Lettering Ribs Script Footprint Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Maud Pellow kept the harbour gate at Skerrow and swore every spring that the tide tables lied to her. Each dawn before the fleet went out, there were prints on the slipway that nobody had made: a line of boot-sized marks running from the cottages down to the wet stones at the water's edge, then stopping as if the walker had simply stepped off the world.

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Her grandson Tam was nine that year, and his own feet were too small for anything in the house. He had been taking his drowned uncle's sea boots from the locker under the stairs, packing the toes with newspaper, and walking them down to the mole each night to stand beside the lamps. Maud watched from her window and said nothing, because a boy who could walk that quietly would make a fair hand on a boat.

The skipper of the Fidelity, Arthur Venn, refused him at the gangway. No boy went to sea until he could tie a bowline blind, Venn said, so Tam practised knots on the bedpost until his fingers bled. On the last night of the month he chalked a message on the harbour wall where the lamplight fell, in his best capitals: MISCHIEF MANAGED. Venn read it at four in the morning and laughed until he had to hold the rail.

At first light the Fidelity sailed with a boy in borrowed boots coiling rope at the bow. Behind them on the slipway the prints ran down into the surf and were gone, the tide already smoothing them into the sand.