Black script lettering on a forearm reads I looked in the mirror, & Decided to stay, set against patterned fabric.

Script quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries two lines of black script lettering, with a larger ampersand linking the lines. The linework is smooth and even, with the letters in grey-black ink on the skin. The photograph is taken at close range, with the text running diagonally across the frame over a busy patterned fabric in the background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Script Ampersand Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mirror above the sink in the boarding house on Cleethorpes Road has a crack running corner to corner, so your face comes back to you in two halves that disagree slightly. Your holdall is already packed on the bed behind you. The ferry ticket for Bergen sits folded in your coat pocket, and Dennis Harle's last words from the quay are still in your ears: dawn tide Tuesday, or you're not on the Marigold, and I'll not wait for anyone who's been crying in a bathroom.

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You had cried, though not for long, and not over Dennis. It was the net. Three nights back, off the Dogger, the warp had parted with a noise like a rifle, and the whole starboard boom had come down across the deck. Young Tom had gone over the rail after a float and the sea had given him back to you by his collar. You remember the cook, Maureen, counting tins of peaches on the galley floor while the boat rolled, because counting was something to do with her hands.

You wipe the glass with your sleeve. The face in it looks like someone who has been up for thirty hours, and it looks, you think, like someone who could sail one more season if it were asked of her plainly. You take the ticket out and tear it into strips the width of a finger, then into smaller strips, and you drop them in the bin under the sink like confetti after a wedding nobody came to.

At four the quay is black and wet and smells of diesel and gulls. The Marigold's wheelhouse light is on. Dennis is on deck, coiling rope in the way he always does, as though it were a hymn he had learned as a boy. He doesn't look up when you come down the gangway. He just says, "Kettle's on," and you hang your oilskin on the hook beside the one with your name painted on it in white, and go below.