Colour tattoo of two overlapping buttons, one purple and one blue, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple and blue buttons on the wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two round buttons overlap on the inner forearm, the upper one purple and the lower one blue, each with four sewing holes. The linework is smooth and the buttons have soft shading, with lighter highlights along the edges that give them a rounded, three-dimensional look. The design sits centrally on the forearm against plain skin, with wooden flooring and a door visible in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week out of Bristol the ship's buttons had run out, and the captain's coat hung open like a broken promise. Mags Pennock, who kept the sail locker and the sewing box, took the bosun's shears and went digging through the sea chests for anything round enough to matter.

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She found two at the bottom of a seaman's ditty bag: a violet one, worn smooth, that might once have sat on a dead boy's Sunday waistcoat, and a blue one the colour of the harbour at Cardigan, though she had never been there. Nobody could say how they came to be in the bag. The cook swore a gull had carried them aboard. The carpenter said the old mate had hidden them to keep the sea from taking the crew's luck. Mags sewed them onto the captain's cuffs anyway, four holes each, the thread drawn tight so the shine caught the lamp.

When the wind dropped off the Cape Verdes and the water lay flat as pewter, the captain asked where she had come by such fine work. She told him the truth, that she had found them. He turned the blue one over in his palm for a long while, then said a button kept a coat closed in weather, and a man ought to know what held him together.

That night Mags unpicked the violet button from his cuff and sewed it to her own sleeve. When the ship came up the Avon with its sails furled, she still had one thing aboard that the sea had never asked her to give back.

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