Black fine line lettering reading BABE IS BUSY on the outer upper arm of a woman in a grey t-shirt seated in a salon chair.

Small black lettering on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a grey t-shirt sits in a black salon chair with her arm bent, showing a small tattoo of three short lines of uppercase sans-serif lettering on the outer upper arm. The letters are thin and evenly weighted in solid black ink, with no shading. The muted background and soft focus keep attention on the arm and the wording.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorrie Keel had kept the telegraph key on the Skerry post office for nineteen years, and in all that time nobody had sent anything longer than nine words, because the ferry came twice a week and islanders paid by the letter. So when Harald Moss came in out of the rain on a Tuesday with a folded slip of paper, she read it before she could stop herself. It said only: BABE / IS / BUSY.

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"Who's the babe?" she asked.

"My wife. She's at the net shed gutting cod for Thursday's boat, and she has told me since March that I am underfoot." He leaned on the counter and dripped onto her ledger. "I want the mainland to know I am not sulking. I am being correctly occupied."

Dorrie tapped it out, three short words and the cheapest message she had ever sent. The reply came back before the kettle boiled, which had never happened on Skerry. She sent a boy running up the hill with it, and he came back blowing hard with a scrap of net-shed paper in his fist. Maud had written in capitals, the way she wrote everything, so the boy wouldn't misread her: SO IS THE SEA. COME HOME BY SIX.

Harald read it twice and went red to the ears. He paid Dorrie a shilling he did not owe her and walked out whistling, though it was only half past two and the cod were not yet in. Dorrie pinned the scrap above the key, where it stayed for years, curling a little at one corner, beside the notice about the Thursday boat.

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