Small wave tattoo on forearm

The Marrow Gull was a thirty foot cutter that carried letters and tins of paraffin between Skerrow and the outer rocks, and Nell was her only hand after her father's lungs gave out. One October evening, with fog sitting on the water like wet wool, she had a sick boy aboard called Tam Quoy who needed the doctor on the mainland, and a sea that would not lie down. The bar at the harbour mouth was the worst thing on the coast. Men had drowned on it who knew it blind.

The sun went down red behind the cloud and the water went flat as a plate, and that was the most frightening thing of all, for Nell knew what a flat sea meant. Then a single swell came up out of the dark, no higher than a man's knee, and lifted the Gull as gently as a mother lifts a cot. Nell laughed out loud. She stood at the tiller, raised her right hand to the lighthouse with the thumb and little finger out, the old signal that says all well, and the keeper flashed his lamp twice in answer. They went over the bar on that swell like a sleepy cat over a wall.

Tam recovered and grew into a man who fished for mackerel with his sons, and when they asked how his lungs ever came right he would only say a small wave had carried him home. Nell never told anyone it was the smallest wave she had ever seen, nor that she had been waiting for it all her life. There. That's the story. Now pass me the kettle before it boils dry.