Black outlined smiley face with X eyes, a trail of black arrowheads and ink splatter, over teal and pink wash on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Smiley face with X eyes and arrow tail

Other · Mixed · Photo

A black outlined smiley face with X-shaped eyes sits at the centre of the design, with a trail of black arrowhead shapes and scattered ink dots running down the left side. Behind the linework are flat patches of teal green and bright pink, which give the piece a painted look. The bold, solid black lines dominate the composition, and the tattoo is photographed close up on a limb.

Other Smiley face Arrow Ink splatter Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The teal was meant for the lifeboat davits, but by the ninth day out of Montevideo Pinnock had run out of patience and out of the sensible tins, so the bosun's spare pink went on the forward hatch instead. Nobody complained. The Vesper Lune had been six weeks at sea with nineteen crew, a cook who knew only tinned peaches, and a fortnight of grey water, and a ship that looked like a sweet shop was, it turned out, a comfort.

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Old Teodor, the carpenter, had cut a stencil of arrowheads from a sheet of tin, and he pressed them down the port rail in a line that pointed nowhere in particular, as though the sea might need directions. Every spray shed a little black off the points and left a dot on the deck. Kaveh, the apprentice, counted the dots each morning and kept a ledger of them in the back of his logbook, betting himself that the number would reach a thousand before Tilbury.

The face was Ada Lusk's idea, though she never admitted it. She had painted it on the bulkhead below the bridge during the middle watch, two X eyes and a grin, and in the morning the whole crew stood on the boat deck pretending not to look at it. She ordered it scraped. Teodor said the rust would only show through, and by then she was too tired to argue.

At the Nore the pilot came up the ladder, glanced at the forward hatch, and asked who had done the face. Ada said nobody had done anything, it had been there since the Azores. He grinned back at it. Under the paint the old steel had rusted into the same shape, two crosses where the eyes should be, and not one of them could say when it had first appeared.