Black outline tattoo of a stylised scorpion above the Roman numerals XIX, on the upper arm of a person in a light vest.

Scorpion and XIX on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised black scorpion with a curved tail, pincers and segmented body sits above the Roman numerals XIX, both drawn in bold black outline. The linework is solid and even, with the scorpion's segments and legs filled in simply, and the photo shows no colour, only black ink on skin. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a plain light background.

Upper arm Scorpion Roman numeral Outline Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Porthgarrow would crew the nineteenth boat after the spring gales, so Tomas Reddan took her out alone, the way his grandfather had once done when the others laughed at him. The fleet was nineteen hulls in all, each with its number painted white on the bow, and the nineteenth had been named for the scorpion that Ansel the carpenter cut into her stem the winter she was launched. He carved it from a black oak beam pulled off a wreck at Gull Point, and the segments of its body were as even as rings in a cut log. The old men said a boat with a tail like that would find what the others missed.

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For three weeks the sea stayed flat and the fleet came home with empty nets. The other skippers traded looks across the quay and said the nineteenth was unlucky, and Tomas stopped answering them. On the twenty-second night he rowed out past the shoals where the stones showed like knuckles, and somewhere beyond the last buoy the boat's stem swung round on its own, the carved tail pointing east into the dark. He let the wheel go and followed it. The net went down, bellied, and came up so heavy with pilchard that the winch groaned, the fish packed silver and close as the scorpion's segments.

He was back at the quay before the gulls were up. He took a brush and a pot of white paint and redid the numeral on the bow, the old Roman letters Ansel had insisted on, X, I, X, because a boat ought to count itself among the others. The skippers came down to watch the catch go up and said nothing about luck. The next morning a basket of salt fish sat on the nineteenth berth, left there by the widow Pryce, and nobody in Porthgarrow ever asked her why.