Black script quote reading The past can hurt, you can either run from it or learn from it, above a black-outlined Simba cub tattoo with red and grey shading.

Simba cub and script quote

Lettering · Mixed · Photo

A black cursive script quote sits above a cartoon lion cub outlined in thick black ink. The cub is shaded with soft grey and red-pink tones on its body and mane, while the quote is in solid black linework. The tattoo fills most of the frame against plain skin.

Lettering Lion cub Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hallam had carved the cub himself, on the stern of the Marigold, the summer before the fever took his wife. Tobias Rennie had stood beside him on the quay, nineteen and sulking, and watched the chisel take the curl of the tail. Now the cub hung above the transom, its paint gone the colour of weak tea, and Tobias was three days out from Lisbon with a hold full of coal and a chart he had not looked at in weeks.

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The bosun's mate, Ada, found him in the lamp room at the middle watch with the logbook open and nothing written. She asked whether he meant to go on pretending the wind was his fault. He said he meant to go on pretending he could not hear the pumps. She said the pumps had been loud for a fortnight and the carpenter had sounded them twice. That was true. Tobias had told the captain the leak was a weeping seam. It was not. It was the rotten timber he had patched badly years back, to hide a split he had been too proud to report.

He went down with a lantern and a bucket of oakum, through the bilge where the water was warm and stank of tar. He worked until his palms bled, the way Hallam had taught him, and when he climbed out the sun was a hot coin over the swell. He carried the logbook to the captain's cabin and laid it open on the desk, the false entry crossed through with one neat line.

Above the stern, the wooden cub still crouched with its head down, looking back at the wake. Tobias sat on the taffrail beneath it and read the crossed-out words twice. Then he wrote the true ones underneath in pencil, so the captain could rub them out if he disagreed. Nobody rubbed them out.