Close-up of a small black serif letter K tattoo behind a pierced ear, in lettering style, placed on the skin behind the ear.

Small serif letter K behind the ear

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of an ear with a small, thin black serif capital letter K tattooed on the skin directly behind it. The letter has clean, even linework with no shading, and the tattoo is set against a pale skin tone. The ear has several metal piercings, and loose hair frames the top and left of the composition.

Lettering Fine line Other Serif Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the lamp, because I'll not tell this twice in the one watch. Forty-one days out of Valparaiso on the barque Hesper, with a hold full of nitrate and a cook who could not tell salt from sugar, and the only thing the second mate would talk about was the letter K. He had cut it into the inside of the chart box lid with a marlinspike, a plain upright letter with neat little feet at the ends, the sort you see on a churchyard stone. Nobody knew whose it was. He said it was his wife's initial. He said it was his mother's. On the Tuesday he swore it was the name of a schooner he had run down off the Horn when he was a boy, and the bosun laughed until he had to sit on a coil of rope.

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The mate would not be drawn on it, and that made the men keen. We took to guessing over the dog watch, each of us with a different woman and a different sea. The cook said it stood for kettle. Old Pell said it was the sixth letter of a word that would get a man hanged in Liverpool. I thought it looked like a key, and said so, and was told to keep my fancies for the fo'c'sle.

On the last night before the Channel, the second mate came up to the wheel with his coat open and his hands cold, and he took the lantern from its hook and held it close to my face. He turned my head with one finger, the way you'd check a sail for chafe, and then he laughed low and said, there, you see, it's only a mark a man can carry where he likes. He never said whose it was. He didn't need to. I've carried a good many things since, and never once found a use for the lantern.