Thin black lettering reading STAY ALIVE, with the letters crossed by a single horizontal line, tattooed across the inner wrist beside a line-art design sheet.

Stay Alive lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a wrist showing the words STAY ALIVE tattooed in small black letters that are crossed by a single horizontal line. The letters are set at varying angles and sizes, and the lettering sits across the wrist with the skin lit warmly. A line-art version of the design is shown on a white panel to the right of the photo.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Word Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook aboard the Margery Ann had a rule about the lead line. Every morning before the galley fire was lit, he walked the length of the deck with the sounding line coiled over his arm, feeling for the knots his grandfather had cut into it with a hot blade. Each knot meant a fathom. Below the last one, in letters cut crooked and shallow, were the words STAY ALIVE. The weight at the end was shaped like a tear, and it was the only thing aboard that never complained.

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One February the fog came down thick off the Skerries and stayed nine days. The skipper, a man called Harrow who did not believe in cooks, wanted soundings every half hour. The cook took them. Between casts he sat on the hatch with a pan of potato peel and told the deckhands what the marks meant. Seven fathoms, the crosspiece, meant you could still hear the gulls on the Ness. Ten, the long mark, meant you were nearly through. Sixteen meant you should have been dead already and somebody had lied to the chart.

On the ninth night the line came up with the weight caught on something soft and wrong. The cook would not let anyone haul it fast. Hand over hand he brought it in, counting knots by feel, and at the eleventh fathom the water fell away and the sea floor came up with it, a shelf of grey stone, and beyond that open water the chart did not show. He turned the boat by the sound alone.

When the fog lifted at dawn the Ness was a green line off the bow and the galley fire was already warm. The cook scratched the words into the bulkhead beside the stove, the way his grandfather had, and told the hungry men to eat before they asked him anything.