Black and white photo of black and grey knuckle tattoos spelling SAVE THEM, with forearm tattoos of a scorpion and a star, holding a white puppy.

Save Them knuckle tattoos holding a puppy

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of two forearms cradling a young white puppy with a dark patch on its head. The letters S-A-V-E on the left knuckles and T-H-E-M on the right form the words SAVE THEM in bold outlined lettering. The forearms carry black and grey traditional-style tattoos, including a scorpion and a star, shaded in greys against a dark top.

Lettering Traditional Hand Forearm Dog Scorpion Star Dagger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide went out at ten past five and left the slipway slick with weed, and you were already down there with a bucket when the Morrow boy came running to say there was something in the lobster pots off the breakwater that wasn't a lobster. You didn't ask what. You had been pulling things out of the harbour for thirty years: pram wheels, a church bell's clapper, once a sack of kittens tied off with fishing line, and you had not saved all of those.

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The thing in the pot was a pup, white as gull fat, with a dark smudge over one eye as though someone had pressed a thumb into wet ink. It had been sewn into a feed sack with a stone. Its ears were still folded flat. Nobody on Corran Quay would own to it. The harbourmaster shrugged, the chandler's wife said it was none of hers, and the lad who'd found it held out his hand for a shilling until you looked at him long enough that he put the hand back in his pocket.

You carried it up the steps inside your coat. Old Tessa at the surgery had a box by the stove and a bottle of warm milk, and she said pups were tougher than they looked, which was a thing people said about everything worth keeping. By the time the tide turned again the pup had found the warmth under your collarbone and gone quiet there, breathing like a bellows that had been put away wet.

Next morning you mixed black enamel from the boat shed and painted a sign for the post office window, letters fat and uneven, and pinned it beside the tide tables: SAVE THEM. Underneath, smaller, you wrote the name you had given the pup, because a dog with no name was just another thing the harbour had swallowed. Nobody asked what the sign meant. By Friday there were three more pups in the box by the stove.