Black and grey photo of the words skin is boring in script tattooed among bold black linework on skin.

Skin is boring script tattoo

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the phrase skin is boring written in a slanted serif script across the skin. Heavy black outline linework surrounds the lettering, with what looks like angular shapes and rope or sail-like lines around it. The image is entirely black and grey with high contrast and a shallow depth of field.

Lettering Script Lettering Phrase Linework Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Ostler kept the sail loft above the chandlery in Deptford, and every Friday he climbed the stairs with a tin of tar and an opinion. "Canvas is honest," he said, pinning a fresh cloth flat across the trestles. "Skin is boring. Nothing happens on it that the weather didn't put there first."

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Tobias, who was fifteen and had been sewing bolt-ropes since Michaelmas, took this as a dare. That night, with the lamp hooked to a beam and the leech half stitched, he chalked a rope along the hem and a tilted yard above it, and then, because the old man had gone home without his tin, he borrowed a stub of pen from the ledger and lettered the thing that had been bothering him all week across the corner of the cloth in a slanted serif hand: skin is boring.

In the morning Ostler held the sail up to the window and laughed until he had to sit on a coil of hawser. He did not unpick it. The Mary Sumner cleared the Thames on the next tide with that sentence on her mainsail, and the crew, who had no use for poetry, argued about it through two gales, a fever in the forecastle and the loss of a whole barrel of biscuit to the damp.

The sail came home to Deptford eleven years later, patched and salt-white, and the words were still there, faded to the colour of old bone. Tobias was a master sailmaker by then, with a loft of his own. He never asked a customer to explain the rope on the hem, and when a boy asked him why he cut every corner with a line of writing, he only pointed at the tin on the sill, rusted shut, which Ostler had left him and which no one had ever opened.