Black script reading Only time with a shaded whale tail fin on the outer ankle and foot.

Only time script with whale tail on ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a foot showing the words Only time in flowing script, with a shaded whale tail fin trailing from the end of the lettering. The linework is black, and the tail has soft grey shading. A second foot is blurred in the background with a small anchor tattoo visible on its ankle.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide tables said the slipway would be dry by four, and Alf Tregarthen had never once been wrong about water. He kept the figures in pencil on the back of the harbour calendar, forty years of them, and read them out the way other men read the lesson in chapel. So when the whale came in past the breakwater at half two, rolling on its side like a dropped coin, he stood on the wall with his hands deep in his coat and said nothing for a long time.

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"Tables don't say what the sea'll do," he said at last. "They only say what it did before." The whale lay in the shallows beyond the mooring buoys, its tail flat on the sand, grey as wet slate. Half the village came down with buckets and coils of rope. Nobody knew how long it had been coming, or whether it had already decided to leave.

My job was to write the times in the log, so I wrote them: ten past, twenty past, the water drawing back a hand's width every quarter hour. When the tide finally turned, the whale turned with it, and the fin lifted once above the foam like someone waving from a train window. Alf took the pencil from behind his ear and crossed out his own figure for high water.

Underneath, in the margin where he kept his notes, he wrote two words in careful capitals: ONLY TIME. "Tide's got a clock of its own," he said, handing me the pencil. "Best not to argue with it."

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