Black script lettering reading tattoo on the inner wrist of a raised hand, shown in black ink against pale skin.

Script word tattoo on inner wrist

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A raised open hand, palm facing the camera, with a small black script word reading tattoo on the inner wrist. The lettering has smooth, even linework with a slightly handwritten feel and sits just above the wrist crease. The image is a candid, slightly soft photograph in neutral tones, with a grey sleeve and a dark background behind the hand.

Lettering Hand Word Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The word was Dennis's idea, and Dennis could not spell anything longer than that, so we had it done on the galley table of the Maris Star at four in the morning, with the engine thudding through the boards and a fish tote for a stool. He had a needle sterilised over the gas ring and a bottle of Indian ink that had come off a Grimsby chandler's shelf. He said that if a man was going to be daft enough to get inked off a trawler, he should at least get the word for what he was doing.

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Skipper Haskins came down the companionway to see what the racket was and stood there in his oilskins for a long time saying nothing. Then he said the lettering was tidy, which from him was a medal. Dennis blew on it, wiped it with a rag that smelled of diesel, and told me to keep the hand flat on the table so the lines would not run. They did not run. They sat just above the wrist crease, small and neat, and I thought it looked like something a lad would be ashamed of by Tuesday.

He lost a bet to Haskins that winter, a pound on whether the Star would make Hull before the Christmas swell. Dennis paid it out of his share, and that was the only thing he ever owed anyone. The ink faded to grey by spring, and by the time the boat was sold he was gone to the Dogger on another vessel, and nobody had asked him what the word meant.

I still wash my hands in the wheelhouse sink each morning, and when I look down the mirror shows the letters the wrong way round. It still says what Dennis meant, which was that you do not get to choose what you carry off the water, only whether you carry it with a steady hand.