Colour tattoo of a sinking ocean liner with small boats in the water, placed on the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sinking ocean liner on chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a large ocean liner tilting into the sea, with its bow raised and funnels and masts visible. Smaller boats and debris float in the blue water in the foreground. Smooth shading gives the black upper hull and red lower hull depth, with yellow funnels and blue water adding colour across the composition.

Chest Ship Sea Water Boat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Frank had bought the whole of the Miners' Arms a drink the night before he sailed, and by the Thursday the news had come up the valley with the pit cage and got into every kitchen before the kettles boiled. My mother stood at the Co-op counter with the paper flat under her gloves and read the headline twice, her finger moving under each word the way she read the rent book. Nobody in Haddon Row could believe a ship that size would go over, and nobody said so out loud either.

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My father was a deputy at the colliery and knew water better than any man in the county. Water always finds the low road, he said, at the table with his tea going cold, looking at nothing. By the Saturday the lists had gone up on the Institute wall, typed in capitals on the back of an old timetable. We crowded in with our caps in our hands and read them down, then read them again, because the names were the only thing that held still.

Frank's name was not on the first list, nor the second. On the third day a boy on a bicycle came up Dene Terrace with a telegram nobody wanted to open. It was not for us. It was for the Hendersons, who had lost a son in the boats that went down under the funnel smoke. We sat on our step and watched the boy pedal past, and my mother said nothing at all.

On the Tuesday Frank walked up the hill in a borrowed coat with his hands wrapped in rags. He had been in the last boat off, hauled from the cold water by a fisherman's crew, and he stood at the gate a long time before he came in. Mam went out to meet him in her slippers. Afterwards she unpinned the first list from the wall and folded it into the Bible, with the blank space where his name should have been, and she never did throw it away.