Close crop of a woman in a black strappy top showing a small teal script tattoo on her upper chest near the shoulder.

Small script tattoo near the collarbone

Lettering · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A close crop of a woman's upper torso wearing a black strappy top, a gold chain necklace with a crescent pendant, and hoop earrings. A small cursive word is tattooed on the upper chest near the shoulder, rendered in a single muted teal-green ink with fine, even linework. The tattoo is partly shaded by the top's strap and her hair, and the rest of the frame is plain skin and clothing.

Lettering Shoulder Script Cursive Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the boat is in the water at last, and Father has had her name painted across the stern in a green he mixed himself, the colour of the harbour wall after rain. He wanted proper script, the looping kind the old chandlers used, so he paid a sign-writer from Padstow who arrived with a flask of tea and a fine brush wrapped in chamois. The word is Blessing. I told him it sounded like something you sing at a funeral. He said that was the point of a boat name, to make the sea feel it had been asked politely.

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The sign-writer took three days over the letters. Each evening he sat on an upturned crab pot leaning close to the wood, and the wind kept lifting the little tarpaulin he had rigged over the work. Mrs Dunstan from the net loft brought him soup on the second night and stayed to watch the capital B come together, she said, like a gull landing and thinking better of it. On the last afternoon he took a thin pencil and drew a small crescent moon beneath the transom. Nobody asked him to. Father has not decided yet whether to let it stay.

The moon is a thin paring tonight, the kind the fishermen call a horn, and I can see it from the window over the sink. I keep thinking about the way the teal sits against the grey water when the light goes flat. Father has taken her out twice already, only as far as the buoy, and he came back both times with his cap in his hands and the look he gets when he has been somewhere he did not expect to go.

Come home on Saturday. Bring the good tin of shortbread, and do not let Mother talk you into the blue dress again. Tell me honestly if you think the name is too much. I will not show Father this letter. He would only pretend he had not read it.

Love, Maud