Small lettering tattoo on the back of the neck
Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo
A person is photographed from behind, with their hair gathered up to show a small black tattoo on the back of the neck. The tattoo is made of a few simple characters in thin, even linework with solid black ink and no shading. The background is a car interior with a side window and wing mirror, and the image is in colour with a blue plaid shirt in the foreground.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Sit closer, the wind's only after the shutters. You want to know about the marks on the lamp-room glass? My grandfather's grandfather scratched them there with a nail the winter the Mary Ellen went down off the Scarrow reef. Three letters, no more, angled like birds tipping into a crosswind. Nobody on Scarrow could read them. The minister said they were Norse, and the schoolmaster said they were nothing but a child's idle hand.
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The keeper's daughter, Ailsa Crane, could read them. She'd learned her letters from a bible her mother left in the boathouse, and she sat on the iron steps every evening reciting them under her breath while the lamp turned. Some nights she'd rest her head back against the cold rail and say the marks were a promise, not a warning.
Then came the autumn when fog sat on the water for nine days. On the ninth, a lantern showed through the murk, bobbing, and Ailsa went up the stairs two at a time, took a stub of chalk from her apron, and drew the three shapes on the glass backwards so the men out there would read them right. The boat turned for the gap in the rocks. Every man aboard came home, and the shapes are still there, faint now, if you hold your breath and look.
That's the whole of it. Tide's turning. Mind the third step, it's loose.
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