Black script reading Refuse to sink with a small anchor and stars, tattooed on the upper chest near the shoulder.

Refuse to sink script with anchor on chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words Refuse to sink in flowing black script, with a solid black anchor below the letters and three small five-point stars around it. A decorative swash extends from the end of the word sink. The photograph is a close, slightly angled view of the upper chest and shoulder, with the skin and tattoo in clear focus.

Lettering Chest Anchor Script Star Lettering Swash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the fire, because this is the night the Brenna Mary nearly went to the bottom of Saltmere Sound with her hold full of wet barley. The third bell had gone and the water was up past the floorboards, and the crew were already eyeing the cargo the way a man eyes his debts.

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Tobiah Crane would not have it. He stood at the pump with his sleeves tied back and his knuckles split, and he would not cut a single sack loose. Over his head, painted on the bulwark, were the words his daughter Wren had put there in green when she was nine years old, every letter curling like a fern that wanted the light: Refuse to sink. The paint had weathered to grey, but the curls were still there, and Tobiah had never once let a man scrub them off.

They pumped until the stars came out over the Sound, three small ones low and bright above the mainmast. At last the old anchor went over the side and bit into the mud of the shallows. The Mary sat down slow and sensible, the way a tired dog lies down, and held there, groaning, until the tide turned and the lamps of Saltmere came up through the dawn like a row of patient eyes.

Wren was waiting on the quay with a lantern she had no need of. She looked at the bulwark, then at her father, and said nothing at all, which in our family is the same as saying well done. Tobiah swears the paint had run a little in the night, and that the swash at the end had grown longer. The Mary is still afloat, and nobody in Saltmere has ever been brave enough to argue with him.