Close-up of a person's ear with a small black fine line script tattoo reading What and a symbol, placed behind the ear.

Small script word behind the ear

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a person's ear and the side of their head, with hair pulled back. A small word in thin black cursive script, reading What followed by a small symbol, sits on the skin just behind the ear. The fine linework is crisp and even, and the photo is taken in natural light against a plain background.

Lettering Fine line Other Script Word Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Marigold Star finished a sentence in the wheelhouse. Skipper Dunstan spoke in grunts, the engine spoke over him, and the gulls took whatever was left. So when I came aboard at Grimsby with a borrowed oilskin and no sea legs, I learned the one word that cut through everything. He would bark it from the chart table and I would turn a half-second too late, and he would sigh like a man who had been right about me all along.

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February brought the worst blow of the year. We were hauling the net off the Dogger when the winch cable parted with a crack like a rifle, and the stern rail came up at us like a barn door. Dunstan roared my name twice. I was already moving before the sound reached me, because the word had formed in my head first, and that was the only reason Tommy Pell from Bridlington kept his fingers. Afterwards nobody thanked anybody. Dunstan just tapped the bulkhead beside my bunk and said, "What," and I understood it was a question about whether I was still alive.

He never wrote much in the log. The entry for that day, in his cramped capitals under the weather, reads only SEA MODERATE, NET LOST, and below it a single word with a question mark drawn with a flourish, as if he had made the sound himself. I have the page folded in my wallet. Tommy says it's the most tender thing Dunstan ever put on paper. I say it's just the most honest.