Black script lettering quote running across a forearm tattoo with a small red and pink flower with a green stem on the left.

Script quote and flower on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm tattoo of a handwritten script quote in black ink, running diagonally across the skin and cut off at the right edge of the frame. A small red and pink flower with a green stem sits at the left end of the text, with soft shading on its petals. The photograph is taken at a slight angle against a white blanket, with the ink reading clearly.

Lettering Botanical Forearm Quote Script Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the purser swears we will raise the Horn by the end of the month if the wind holds, and I have stopped believing him about anything except the coal. I have written to you every night since Madeira. The letters will sit in a canvas sack at the agent's office in Valparaíso until someone remembers to post them, so you will get them all at once, like a flood of bad weather. Mrs Ashdown in the next cabin says I am mad to write to a boy four thousand miles away who cannot read cursive yet. I told her you read it perfectly well, because I taught you on the back of the shop ledgers.

Keep reading

The poppy is still in my Bible, between Ruth and the Psalms. You pressed it there yourself the morning I left, saying it would keep me company. The edges have gone the colour of weak tea, but the red is stubborn in the middle, the way it was on the verge by the lock gates. I keep taking it out to look at it. Each time, the petals seem a little more like the ones you drew for me, with the green stem running down and your thumbprint of crayon smudged where your hand slipped. I tell myself that is the lamp.

Tonight the lamp is low, and I have just noticed I wrote the same line three times across three pages, each one leaning further right as the ship rolls. The steward brings oil at six. Until then I am folding this sheet around the flower and tucking it under my pillow, where the rolling cannot reach it. When you are big enough to read this properly, you will know the page is heavier than it looks, and that I was thinking of you the whole way down.