Black and grey lettering tattoo of a curled ribbon banner reading I solemnly swear that I am up to no good, with footprints across the design, on skin.

Ribbon banner with footprints and quote

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey ribbon banner wraps across the design and carries the words I solemnly swear that I am up to no good in serif capitals. Scattered footprints in dark ink trail above and below the banner, and the ribbon curls at both ends with soft grey shading. The piece is shown straight on against plain skin with the design filling most of the frame.

Lettering Other Ribbon Banner Footprint Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The captain swore on his mother's Bible that the Maud Halloran would raise Valparaíso in forty days, and by the thirty-first I had walked her deck from bow to stern with the soles of my boots dipped in lamp black. Every morning Mr Pike, the bosun, counted the prints with his pipe clamped in his teeth. They went up the mainmast shrouds, across the spanker boom and down into the forecastle, where no one had any business being but me. He said they were the ghost of the Dutchman's cook, and he did not say it kindly.

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I was twelve and small enough to sleep in the bread locker, which is how I came to be aboard at all. Nobody had signed me on. I had crept up the gangway at Bristol with a stolen ribbon round my cap, a pocket of pilfered biscuit and a ledger listing every mischief I intended before the Horn. Pike found the ledger in my shirt in the third week. He read it by the binnacle lamp, laughed once like a cough, and tore out the first page to light his pipe. The rest he kept, and I think he read it again each night.

The captain had me hauled before him on the morning we tied up at Valparaíso. He had a list of my crimes and a letter of discharge written in a clerk's hand, and he meant to put me ashore with a shilling and a boot. I stood on the wet planks and said nothing. Behind me the deck was still scuffed with prints that no one had managed to wash clean, and I think even he had begun to find them a comfort.

When the gangway went down, I walked it with my boots still black, and each step stamped the wood. Pike watched from the rail and did not stop me. At the bottom I turned back and saw the captain bend to examine the last print, then straighten and grin the way men do when they have lost an argument they enjoyed. 'Sail on, you little devil,' he called. I did, though not on his ship.