Black script lettering reading Love is All or Nothing with a small heart, tattooed along the upper arm.

Script quote with heart on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of black script lettering spelling out a phrase, with a small heart at the end, across the outer side of an upper arm. The linework is smooth and fairly bold, with the letters flowing diagonally across the skin. The image is almost entirely black ink on skin against a dark background, with a hand and a bracelet visible at the lower left.

Lettering Upper arm Script Lettering Heart Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook had chalked the words on the galley slate the morning the Marigold left Hull, a line he'd picked up from a girl who sang it outside the chandler's. Nobody aboard could say whether he meant it for the crew or for himself. Dessie Corrigan, the third engineer's boy, read it twice over his porridge and asked what it was supposed to mean.

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"It means you don't get to half-love the sea," said Abel Rook, wiping his hands on a flour sack. "Either you go all the way under or you stay on the quay." He had lost a wife to a tram and a brother to a winch drum, and he never said which of those had taught him the lesson. Dessie laughed, then stopped, because Abel had drawn a small heart at the end of the line in red pencil, pressing so hard the lead snapped.

Off Spurn the weather turned. A sea came over the galley hatch and tore the slate off its hook, and when Dessie went down on his knees to gather the pieces, he found older writing beneath the chalk, scratched in with a nail: two names and a year, 1911, and a line that had been rubbed nearly smooth.

In the morning Dessie carried the slate back to its hook, rechalked the phrase with a steady hand, and drew the heart a little bigger. Abel said nothing when he saw it. He only set the kettle on and tapped the lump of wet cloth that had been, for twenty years, the only thing he ever used to wipe the board clean.