Red blackletter letter with black cracked shading and small black script lines above and below it, tattooed on a forearm, in a lettering style.

Red blackletter letter with script quote on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large red blackletter letter with black cracked lines sits centre-frame on the forearm, with black script text above and below it. The shading is solid red fill with black linework and marks across the letter, and the script is thin and black. The photograph is taken straight on, with the arm filling most of the frame against a soft, cluttered background.

Lettering Forearm Script text Quote Crack

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had been scrubbing the steel counter since the trawler cleared the Humber, and the grease would not come off. Behind the bulkhead the engine thudded like a slow heart. Her brother Tom had painted the boat's name across the wheelhouse last spring, a red blackletter on grey primer, and the cold had been working at it ever since, splitting the paint along every stroke until the letter looked dug up from a mud bank.

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The skipper, Pryce, came down for his tea with salt crusted in his beard and said the paint was a disgrace. "Tom's hand," she said, "and the sea's." He sat without arguing. The swell lifted the porthole and let it drop, and the pans on their hooks swung together as if they had agreed on something.

That night she took a stiff brush and a tin of black enamel up to the wheelhouse, meaning to tidy the cracks before the tide turned. Under the lamp she found the first draft Tom had scratched into the metal with a nail before he ever mixed the red. It was a line their mother used to sing over the washing, and Ada read it twice before the boat rolled and the tin went over the rail into the dark.

She left the cracks in the end. When they tied up at Hull on Sunday the letter looked as though it had been dragged through every gale on the coast, which it had, and Pryce ran his thumb along one of the splits and said nothing at all.