Profile silhouette and script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with red hair in an updo, decorated with small white flowers, is photographed from behind. Her upper back carries a black tattoo of a profile silhouette containing a ship, framed by ornate looping script that reads partly as 'And days went by'. The shading is solid black with fine linework in the lettering, and the composition is centred on the tattoo against green woodland.

Lettering Back Silhouette Profile Ship Script Lettering Hair Updo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the pump again, so Nell Haddow carried the kettle from the range to the sink by hand, as she had every morning since her father stopped being able to lift it. Outside the window the yard was grey and the hens sulked under the eaves. On the table lay her brother's letter, the third this year, its envelope gone soft from being opened and folded and opened again.

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He wrote from Valparaiso of a ship called the Marigold Ann, of a cook who sang hymns in Welsh and a bosun who would not eat fish. He wrote that the sea was a colour he had no name for. Nell read it twice, then a third time with her finger under the line about the bosun, and she laughed out loud in the empty kitchen, startling the dog from his basket.

The farm did not need her to be sad. The barley was in, the ewes were lambing early, and her father slept most afternoons in the chair by the window with his mouth open. Still, she took a pencil and the back of an old feed invoice and drew the way Tom had taught her as a girl: a head in profile, with a small ship sailing inside it, because that was where he had gone, and she had only ever followed him in her head.

Days went by, the way they do in winter, and the letters came more slowly. When the fourth arrived in March it was a single sheet and a pressed sprig of something blue. Nell pinned the drawing above the range where the steam could reach it, and went back to the pump, which had finally thawed, and filled the kettle to the brim.