Black script letter A with a shaded green four-leaf clover, swirls and small star accents, tattooed on the inside of a forearm.

Script letter A with four-leaf clover on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a large black script letter A with a looping flourish, a shaded green four-leaf clover on its left, and curled black swirls and small star sparkles around it. The outlines are smooth and even, and the clover is filled with green ink that is shaded to show depth. The design sits diagonally across a forearm against a plain light skin tone, with a hand and dark clothing at the edges of the frame.

Lettering Botanical Forearm Script Four-leaf clover Clover Swirl Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barque Marigold had been nine weeks out of Bristol when the cook found the clover in the bread flour. Nobody aboard could say how it got there. Ada Pring held it up to the lantern and turned it, four heart-shaped leaves pressed flat and gone the colour of weak tea, and she decided it was a sign, because at sea everything was a sign if you were tired enough.

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Her brother Tom had sailed with the Marigold's previous cook and knew the old stories. Clover kept a man from drowning, the sailors said, and a letter pressed beside it would travel home safe. Ada had no letter. She had a stub of pencil and the back of a flour sack, and she wrote a single capital A, looping its tail out and round until it looked like a wave curling back on itself. Then she tucked the clover inside the fold, and two of the older hands laughed at her for it.

The storm came off the Azores on the thirtieth night. Water came over the rail and tore the galley door from its hinges, and the foremast cracked like a dry bone. Ada was below with the stove lashed down, and when the lamp swung she saw the sack bundled under the bench with the clover still in its fold. Tom came down the ladder with blood on his cheek and said the mainsail had gone. She did not think about the sack again until morning, when the sea lay flat and grey and every man was counting heads.

Everyone was there. Ada counted twice to be sure. Then she went below and found the flour sack soaked through and the clover still dry in its fold, the A bled a little where the pencil had run. She pinned it to the beam above the stove, and when the Marigold was broken up in Cardiff years later, she was still cooking on the Lisbon run and still refusing to say why.