Small script word "Smile" on a ribcage
Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo
A close photograph of a woman's bare back and shoulder, with a small black script tattoo of the word "Smile" on the side of her torso below the arm. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the lettering is set on a diagonal. The tattoo is the only ink visible against plain, softly lit skin, with a dark top at the edge of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The boarding house at Scarrow Bay had one rule painted above the kitchen door, and nobody could remember who had painted it. Mrs Pell kept the rule because the paint was there. Every guest who came down to breakfast looked up at the word in looping black letters and then, without being asked, looked at her.
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The winter the herring failed, a lodger called Mr Tallis arrived with a trunk full of sea charts and a face like a shut door. He paid in advance, ate his kippers in silence and walked the harbour wall at dusk, counting the gulls. Mrs Pell did not ask him to smile. She simply left the lamp lit in the window on the nights he came back late, and set a saucer of salt on his sill, which was what her mother had done for sailors who had no one.
On the last morning of February he came down early and found the kitchen door open, the word freshly inked and running slightly on its slant, as if the painter had been in a hurry. Beside it Mrs Pell had pinned a letter from a Mrs Tallis in Whitby, unopened for nine years, which she had found behind the dresser. He read it standing up. Then he laughed, once, the sound startling the cat off the range.
Mrs Pell said nothing. She poured his tea, and the word above them kept its quiet rule.
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