Black lettering tattoo in flowing script reading Our scars remind us that the past is real, across a person's upper back.

Script quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a person's upper back showing a quotation in black cursive script, set over three staggered lines. The letterforms have smooth, slightly tapered strokes with some variation in weight, and the skin around them is plain with faint marks. The text sits centrally on the shoulder blade area, and the frame is cropped tightly on the skin.

Lettering Back Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook had cut the bread thin again, and Ruth Calder, third mate of the barque Margaret Lowe, said nothing about it because the Horn lay behind them now and the wind had finally gone soft and warm out of the north. Fourteen weeks out of Hull. Fourteen weeks of sails stiff with ice and men who stopped talking after the second month.

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Her father had taught her to read a chart before she could read a hymn book, and he had also taught her that a splice never forgives a careless hand. On the cold night off Staten Island the marlinspike jumped, opened the skin along her left wrist, and she stitched it herself by lantern light while Mr Peel held the lamp and looked anywhere but at her. The line healed white, then silver. She kept her cuffs buttoned at table.

Peel found her at the taffrail that evening with a bottle of gin under one arm. He did not mention the night off the Horn. He asked whether the log would show the wind backing south-east on the fourteenth, because the owners wanted proof the ship had made her passage honestly. Ruth told him the log showed what they had lived through, and that was all a log was for.

She wrote the entry in ink, the way her father had insisted, and under the weather she added a sentence she had been carrying since the ice. Then she blotted it, shut the book, and went below to find the cook, who she knew would have saved her the heel of the loaf.