Close-up of fine line black script lettering that appears to read Because I say so, on the side of a hip above dark lace underwear.

Script lettering on the hip

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a person's lower back and hip, with a fine script tattoo that appears to read "Because I say so", partly cropped at the right edge. The thin, single-weight black linework is crisp and unshaded, set against warm, dim lighting. Dark lace underwear sits along the bottom of the frame, and a navel piercing is visible higher up.

Lettering Fine line Other Script Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down where the lamp reaches, you lot, because I am not telling this twice. Forty-one days out of Hull, and the Marigold had a boy aboard who would not stop asking questions. Why the sails were reefed. Why we bore south when the charts said west. Why the captain would not let the mate see the log. Every answer was the same, and it was the one that made the boy's ears go red.

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Because I say so.

That was Captain Aske's whole reply, delivered with one hand flat on the chart table as if the sea itself had asked him to account for himself. The boy was Tobias Lund, eleven years old, signed on because his mother owed the chandler more than a boy's wages could cover. He copied the captain's words onto the back of a flour sack in pencil, meaning to show his mother how a man of such standing answered a child.

On the forty-second night the wind died and a light came up off the port bow, low and orange, the kind a drifting boat makes when its lamp is failing. Aske ordered the boats lowered and would not say why. When the mate pressed him, he only said it again, and the crew grumbled and rowed anyway, Tobias pulling an oar beside a man with one ear. They found two men and a girl no older than Tobias, and a cask of water nearly empty. Aske hauled them aboard without a word of explanation.

When Tobias finally reached Hull, he showed his mother the flour sack. She read the words twice, then laughed until she had to sit down on the step, because it was exactly what she had said to him every morning of his life.