Two photos of black script lettering on a leg, one reading I'm fine on the lower leg and one reading save me on the ankle, both shown upside down.

Script lettering reading I'm fine and save me

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The left photo shows the words I'm fine in black, looping handwritten script on the lower leg near the knee, with the text appearing upside down. The right photo shows the words save me in similar black script on the ankle, photographed from a low angle on a grey carpet. The linework is solid and even, with no colour or shading visible.

Lettering Fine line Calf Ankle Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you lot, and mind the gull on the bench. I'll tell you about Nell Pascoe, who was hanging wet sails on the harbour wall the morning the Harbour Board man came up the quay with his cap in his hands. Her boy Tobias had not come in on the Mary Jane with the tide, and the man had a face on him that Nell had seen once before, the year the sea took her husband.

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She did not drop the sail. She fetched the tar pot from the shed, dipped the brush, and began to write along the canvas in the looping hand her mother had taught her, every letter leaning the wrong way so that anyone looking up from the water would read it the right way round. I'm fine, she wrote, though she was not, and then she wrote the other thing underneath, smaller, so that the lifeboat crew coming in low and blind through the fog would find it first.

The fog lifted at dusk. The lifeboat came round the Scrag with a lantern at the bow, and the coxswain, a man called Amos Kitto who could not read a bill of lading to save his life, looked up at the drying sail and laughed at the upside-down words. Then he stopped laughing. Tobias was clinging to a lobster buoy two cables off, with his boots full of water and his cheek split open, and he was very much not fine.

Nell kept that sail for forty years, folded in the chest under the stairs. Every spring she hung it out again and read the words aloud, backwards and forwards, to anyone who would listen. Ask her what they meant, and she'd say they meant exactly what they said, and that the trick was knowing which way up to stand.