Black and white photo of two ankles in rolled jeans and sneakers, with the words Stay and Gold in script lettering tattooed on them.

Stay and Gold script tattoos on ankles

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two black script words, Stay on the left ankle and Gold on the right, are shown with looping flourishes above and below the lettering. The linework is solid and even, with light shading in the letter strokes, and the photograph is black and white. The subject is framed from mid-shin to the sneakers, with the tattoos sitting at the ankles.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's wife never once called the sea by its proper name. She called it the Grey Lady, and she said it had taken her brother off the Skerrow rocks in the winter of the big gale, and that the only sensible thing a body could do was tell the water to hold on to what it had. So when the lamp was fitted that spring, she went down the stone stair with a tin of black paint and a brush no thicker than a bootlace, and painted two words on the seawall where the tide climbs highest. Stay on the north side. Gold on the south, where the sun came up over the harbour roofs and made the whole wall shine like a pan of fresh butter.

Keep reading

The fishermen laughed at her. Who paints advice on a wall, they said, and who reads it? But the boats coming home in fog would run their eyes along the stones, and the words gave them something to steer by when the light was lost in the murk. My grandfather rowed past it a hundred times, and he swore that on the foggiest nights the letters looked wetter than the rest of the wall, as if someone had just finished them and gone home for their supper.

She died with paint still under her nails. The wall has been whitewashed twice since, and the council man wants it gone for a sea defence. Yet every autumn, when the first real gale comes down the coast, somebody goes out with a bootlace brush and touches up the Stay and the Gold. I have never asked who. You don't ask who keeps a promise like that. You just keep your lamp lit and your boots dry, and you go home by the words.

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