Fine line black script reading "do as dreamers do" beside a small black mouse head with a red bow, tattooed on the top of a foot above a black flat shoe.

Script quote and mouse head on the top of a foot

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a foot in a black ballet flat, showing a thin black cursive script that reads "do as dreamers do" running across the top of the foot. A small solid black mouse head silhouette with a red bow sits at the start of the script. The ink is crisp and even on pale skin, with the black linework dominant and only the bow in red, set against a textured cream carpet.

Lettering Fine line Other Quote Script Mouse Bow Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mouse had been aboard the Corrie Lass since Leith, and by the third week of the crossing the cook had given up pretending it was not his. Tomas Ferrie set a saucer of oats beside the bread bin each night and kept his eyes shut when the small grey creature came to collect it, ears pinned back, a faded red bow knotted at its throat with a scrap of signal flag. Captain Hester Lowe wanted it off the ship at the next port. Tomas said nothing, because he had seen the way the animal sat up on its haunches to watch the horizon, as if it were waiting for someone to come over it.

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The weather turned on the eleventh night. A squall came out of the west and the deck tilted until the rain ran sideways across the galley skylight. Tomas was half asleep on a coil of rope when he heard a scrabbling along the rail, and he followed the mouse aft, past the lamp locker and down the companionway into the hold, where a loose hatch was letting in a slow stream of seawater onto the flour sacks. The creature stood on the sill, bow dark with spray, and refused to move until he had wedged the hatch shut with a belaying pin. In the morning the captain looked at the damp patch on the floorboards, then at the saucer, and said nothing at all.

They made Oban on a bright Thursday with gulls shrieking over the harbour. Tomas carried his kitbag down the gangway and stopped at the bottom, because the mouse had come down ahead of him and was sitting on a bollard in the sun, washing its face. It looked at him once, then trotted off along the quay towards the bakery, where the shutters were rolling up and the smell of warm bread drifted out over the cobbles. Tomas watched it go until it was gone. That evening he set out a saucer of oats on the quay wall, just in case.