Black ink ribbon banner reading SHIVER ME TIMBERS on the inner forearm, shown as a temporary tattoo being peeled from its backing sheet.

Shiver me timbers banner on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The design is a three-section ribbon banner with the words SHIVER ME TIMBERS in bold black capitals, one phrase per section, and curled tails drawn in solid black. It sits on the inner forearm of a person in a white top and denim, and a hand is peeling away a clear backing sheet, which suggests a temporary transfer rather than a permanent tattoo. The linework is bold and even, with solid black fills and no shading or colour.

Lettering Forearm Banner Ribbon Scroll Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis Pardoe came into the village hall with a rolled paper under his arm, and the teachers who were left from his day stood up as if the bell had rung. He had been the boy who wanted to be a pirate. He had worn a tea towel tied round his head through three terms, and he had told Miss Holt that the school field was the Spanish Main and the wheelie bins were a treasure galleon.

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He unrolled the paper on the trestle table between the urn and the raffle tickets. It was a banner, three sections long, with curled tails at each end, and the words were printed bold and black across it. SHIVER ME TIMBERS. The old caretaker read it out, then laughed until he had to sit down on a stacking chair.

"I was saving it," Dennis said. "Forty years I carried it about. I thought I'd wave it at the sea when I found one."

Miss Holt, who had taught them all their letters, took the other end of the banner and held it up to the light. She said a ship with timbers that could shiver was a ship that had been well made, and that a boy who had sailed the bins deserved better than a bench in the car park. So they hung the banner from the stage curtain rail, and the whole hall stood under it and sang the only sea shanty any of them knew, the one about the bottle of rum, and the urn boiled over, and nobody minded.

That was the reunion. The banner stayed on the curtain rail until the caretaker died, and after that nobody liked to take it down, which is why, my mother always said, the hall still smells faintly of tar on wet afternoons.