Back of a person's neck with vertical rainbow stripe tattoo above black block lettering reading NOT CRYING ON SUNDAYS.

Rainbow stripes and lettering on the neck

Lettering · Neck · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a band of vertical rainbow-coloured lines, with lines in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, sitting across the back of the neck. Below it, black block lettering in a hand-drawn, slightly uneven style reads NOT CRYING ON SUNDAYS across two lines. The skin is lit warmly from one side against dark hair and a light blue top, and the tattoo is shown head on with the text and stripes clearly readable.

Lettering Neck Rainbow Stripe Lettering Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the fleet by its paint before you learn it by its names. Seven hulls lie nose to tail in Whitby harbour, and each carries a band of colour along the gunwale, red and orange and yellow, then green, blue and purple, the order fixed since your grandfather's day. Yours is the last boat in the line, the one with the purple band that needs touching up every spring because the salt eats it first.

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On Sundays nobody goes out. After the Mary Hale went down off Flamborough, the widows gathered in the chapel hall and agreed that the seventh day belonged to mending nets, baking and feeding whoever turned up at the door. Crying could wait for Monday. Someone painted the rule on the wheelhouse door in black letters that wandered a little, and it has stayed there ever since, slightly crooked, like the men who wrote it.

This Sunday you are on your knees on the slipway with a tin of purple and a brush, and the wind is blowing off the moors. Your brother Tom comes down with two flasks and says the purple has run into the green. You tell him the sea has done worse. You work slowly, the way your mother taught you, laying one stripe beside the next until the colours sit true again and the band looks like it was never broken.

On Monday the boats go out in order. You stand on the pier and watch the purple one slide past the harbour wall, last in the line, its paint still tacky in the sun. You keep the brush in your fist, dry now, and you let yourself cry for as long as the tide allows.