A two-line black script lettering design reading a quotation about strength, shown on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Script quote on strength and survival

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A two-line quotation is written in flowing, handwritten-style black script on a plain white background. The linework is fine and even, with looping ascenders and descenders and slightly uneven baseline strokes. The design is monochrome, with no shading or colour, and the text is centred with generous white space around it.

Lettering Script Quote Strength

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ask anyone who sailed out of Scarborough in the sixties about the galley bulkhead on the Mercy Gull and they'll tell you it was the only honest thing on the boat. It was written in pencil, in a hand that leaned like a man walking into wind, and it said what it said. Nobody argued with it.

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Bert Kellet cut it there the winter his brother went over the side off Dogger Bank. Nobody saw him go. Bert came back to the galley, sat on the lockers with his oilskins steaming on the hook, and pressed the pencil into the wood until the point snapped. The cook was Maggie Dawes, a woman built like a mooring post, and she never once rubbed it out. She said a thing that cost a man that much ought to stay put.

Years later, when I was young enough to be frightened and too proud to say so, I stood in that galley with a mug of stewed tea and read the words like they were a bill I owed. Maggie watched me read them and shrugged. 'It doesn't say you won't break,' she said. 'Just that you'll be worth something after.' Then she took the mug off me and rinsed it, and somewhere under the deck the sea came in through the hatch as if it had been waiting all along.

They broke the Gull up in '79. I went down to the yard with a torch borrowed off a mate and asked for the galley bulkhead. The man at the gate said there was nothing left but rust and a smear of grey where the pencil had been. He was right, and I told him that was all I had come for.