Pencil sketch of a narwhal in outline, with lines of handwritten capital lettering following its body and a long spiral tusk, drawn as a possible tattoo design.

Narwhal outline with lettering in pencil

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil line drawing of a narwhal in profile, with its long spiral tusk extending diagonally to the upper right. Handwritten capital letters follow the curve of the body outline, forming lines of text that include phrases about being dry and thirsty. The drawing is in plain graphite on a pale background with no shading, colour or body part shown.

Tusk Sea creature Handwritten text Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The water trough by the top gate froze solid on the Tuesday, and by Thursday I was the only thing in Hollins Field still wet enough to be worth looking at, which is not the same as being wet. I had come up the Lune on the spring tide, following a fool of a salmon who promised me a lake. There was no lake. There was a hedge, a cattle grid and a woman in a green coat called Bet Pardoe, who stood at the gate with a bucket and a face that had already decided what I was.

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'You're a long way from the sea,' she said. I told her I was very aware of it. I am so thirsty, I said, and my voice came out like a rusty pump. I have been drinking the moisture from the air for three days, licking frost off the wire fence, and it tastes of diesel and sheep. She didn't laugh. She poured the bucket into the frozen trough, which only made a puddle the shape of an apology, then sat down on the gate and asked me what I wanted to say.

I wanted to say a great many things. I wanted to tell her about the ice shelf and the long dark where the sea goes quiet and every creature sings to find its own. Instead I said the only true thing I had: that my tusk was longer than her gatepost and had never once been used for anything useful, not digging, not fighting, only for pointing at the moon. She looked at it for a long while. Then she said, 'Well, you'd better come round the back. The beck's not frozen under the bridge.'

The beck ran black and fast beneath the alders, and I drank until the tusk stopped aching. Behind me the snow began again, settling soft on Bet's shoulders and on my spiral, and for once I did not feel dry at all.