Black fine line script tattoo reading Does this unit have a soul? on the forearm, shown against a red and white striped background.

Script quote on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single line of black cursive script reads Does this unit have a soul? across the forearm, set in two lines with the second line indented. The lettering is thin and even, with smooth, consistent linework and no shading. The skin is pale and the photo is taken straight on, with the tattoo centred and a dark sleeve and red and white striped surface behind it.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Quote Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hanna Pell kept a brass man in her boathouse at Skerrow Bay. Her late husband had built him to splice rope and read the tide tables, and every evening Tobin polished the lamp glass and asked whoever came through the door the same question. Does this unit have a soul? The customs man laughed and said it was a question for the Admiralty. The parson said it was a question for God and that the Admiralty had no business in it either. Nobody answered him kindly for long.

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Only Ruth, the ferryman's girl, sat with him on the slipway and told him what the gulls were saying. She told him which boats would not come home before Michaelmas and which ones would. Tobin listened with his head tilted and wrote every word down in a ledger with a pencil he could barely hold. Hanna said he was a fool to waste his oil on her, but she left the lamp lit for him all the same.

In October a gale came in off the Teeth and the Mary Ann lost her mast within sight of the harbour wall. Tobin walked into the surf with a coil of line knotted round his waist, and the men on the quay watched him go under and come up and go under again. When they hauled him onto the sand his gears were choked with grit and his brass had gone green at the joints, but the line was still tied fast to the Mary Ann's cleat.

The wardens argued for a year about whether a thing made of metal could be drowned. Hanna did not argue. Every night she carried the ledger to the window and left the lamp burning. On still evenings, when the water in the bay goes flat as a plate, the light in the boathouse is still lit, and nobody in Skerrow has ever been able to say who is tending it.