Small blue-black lettering reading 451 with a degree sign, in a simple serif style, on the inner wrist and forearm.

Small 451 degree numerals on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small tattoo showing the numerals 451 followed by a degree sign, set in a simple serif typeface. The lines are thin and even, rendered in a dark blue-black ink with no shading. The text sits centrally on the inner wrist against a plain pale skin background, with a dark sleeve at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Numeral Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada,

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The oven on the Saint Brannock has a brass dial that reads in Fahrenheit, because the chief engineer was trained in Glasgow and will not hear of anything else. I have taken to watching it the way you watch a kettle you don't trust. Last Tuesday it crept round to 451 while I was roasting the Sunday joints for the officers, and I stood there with a tea towel in each hand, thinking of the books in Mr Pell's cabin, the ones he keeps wrapped in oilcloth under his bunk.

I should explain about Mr Pell. He is the second steward, a thin man who reads at the mess table with his elbows on the cloth, and last voyage he asked me to carry a parcel from Antwerp that was heavier than any parcel of socks has a right to be. Inside were eleven paperbacks, poetry mostly, one with the cover torn off so nobody could tell its name. He said the Board had been going through the crew's kit for contraband print. I asked what contraband print a cook would want, and he laughed and said that was exactly why I was the safest hand aboard.

So I have put them in the dry store behind the flour sacks, where the air stays cool and nothing reaches them but rats and the odd inspection. I tell myself that is the sensible place. Some nights I lie in my bunk listening to the ship groan and think how little it would take. A dropped match. A galley fire that gets away from us in a gale.

Ada, if anything happens, look after the poetry. Give the torn one to Mr Pell's sister in Leith. And don't let anyone tell you the dial was wrong.

Yours, Tom