Quote tattoo reading I'm the hero of this story

You had kept the harbour logbook for thirty-one years, tide times in one column, weather in another, and in the margins everything the harbourmaster would never put in writing: who owed whom for diesel, which gull had stolen the Hallows boy's pasty. At your leaving do, Gerald Penhallow read from it aloud and stopped at a page headed Incidents. The entry was in your handwriting and said only: I'm the hero of this story. Nobody laughed at first. Then Maud did, and then the whole back room did, and you pretended to be cross about it while you refilled everyone's glass.

The trouble was that you had meant it as a joke, and the joke had got into you the way salt gets into rope. Each morning after that you rowed out to the moorings before the others were up, checking chains that did not need checking, listening for anyone calling your name across the water. Nobody ever did. The gulls were loud and the tide was turning, and you sat in the stern with the logbook shut on your knee, waiting to see whether the story had a next page.