Black and grey realism portrait of a woman with a city scene and "Ride or Die" script, tattooed across a full back.

Realist woman portrait and script across a full back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a shaded black and grey portrait of a woman with curled hair and dark red lips, set among architectural and cityscape details. Script lettering reading "Ride or Die" runs across the lower back beneath the portrait. The smooth greyscale shading and dense detail fill the whole back, with framed artwork on a dark wall behind.

Realism Lettering Back Portrait Woman Script Ship Clock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, because I will not tell this twice and the bo'sun's clock has run fast since Valparaiso. The barque Marguerite Hale was nineteen days out of Liverpool when the cook found a stowaway asleep in the flour bin. She was a slip of a thing with soot on her collar, and she said her name was Nell Carrow and she had come to find her brother Tom, a stoker who went over the side off the Horn the winter before and was never properly counted.

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The captain wanted her in irons until the next port, and the mate wanted her put ashore with a bag of biscuit. Nell would hear neither. She stood on the poop deck in a borrowed oilskin and told them she had come too far to be sent back to a city that had already taken what it wanted from her family, and that she meant to ride this ship to the end of its road or go down with it, same as she had promised Tom. The men laughed until the wind came round and the glass dropped, and then nobody laughed.

The storm took the foremast, two men and every drop of lamp oil. For three nights Nell worked the pumps beside the hands who had called her a jinx, and on the fourth morning the bo'sun's clock on the bulkhead stopped at ten past six. Nobody would touch it. Nell did, with cold fingers, and the ship limped into harbour with the clock ticking away as if it had never stopped at all.

Tom was not in that harbour, and the harbourmaster had never heard the name. But the men at the rail saw Nell look up at the grey city climbing the hills, lift her hand as though to wave at someone on a balcony, and say quite plainly, 'Still here, you fool.' That was the whole of it. Ask anyone who sailed on her and they'll tell you the clock has kept good time ever since.