Traditional flash drawing of a sailor pin-up woman with closed eyes and a sailor cap, framed by a green laurel wreath and a yellow banner reading Sink or Swim.

Sailor pin-up with laurel wreath and Sink or Swim banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A drawing of a woman with dark rolled curls, closed eyes, teal eyeshadow, red cheeks and lips, wearing a sailor cap and a sailor collar knotted at the front. A green laurel wreath frames her on both sides, and a yellow banner with the words SINK OR SWIM sits across the bottom. Bold black outlines and solid fills sit on a plain tan background, with the colour mostly in the eyes, lips, leaves and banner.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyke at the bottom of Hollin Field froze first at its edges, so the ice ran along the reeds like a strip of tin. My father swore a ewe had gone through it in the hard winter before I was born and nobody found her until March. Uncle Ray swore it was a tractor. Neither of them had seen anything, so I took it as a story to keep us off the water.

Keep reading

Aunt Vi came to stay the week after the harvest supper. She had sailed cargo boats out of Hull for twenty years and still wore a white cap to feed the hens, pulled down so the brim sat level over her eyes. When I asked whether I should tell Dad I'd cracked the water trough, she looked at me over her tea and said, sink or swim, love. That was all the advice I ever got from her, and most of the time it was enough.

The pump failed on a night in January, when the thaw had come in fast and the low ground was already brimming. I went out with a torch and the coil of blue rope from the barn. Vi came behind me in her oilskin without a word. At the dyke she stepped straight in up to her waist, waded along the fence line, and knotted the rope to the gatepost. Hold it, don't pull, she said. I held it until my hands stopped feeling like hands, and the ewes came up the bank one at a time, shaking and bleating, while the water went black around her.

In the morning she unpicked the cap from the damp of her hair, shook it out, and hung it on the laurel hedge by the gate, where the frost had blackened half the leaves. The rest will come back, she said, if we keep them out of the wind.

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