Black ink tattoo of a hand-drawn stick figure with arms raised above a heart shape, with the word ALIVE beneath it, on the upper body.

Stick figure with ALIVE lettering on upper body

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black stick figure with arms raised and a heart-shaped loop above its head, shown with legs splayed and feet resting on a line. The word ALIVE in capital letters sits beneath the figure. The linework is rough and uneven, with solid black fill and no shading or colour, set against freckled skin.

Other Stick figure Heart Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The harbour log hangs on a nail inside the lamp room at Skerrow Point, and for forty years it has held nothing but tides, wind bearings and a tally of boats out. Mr Pell, the harbourmaster, keeps it in black ink and will not have a drawing in it. When I was given the post of lamp boy at fifteen, I thought that was the whole of the rule.

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The February gale took the Brenda Ann out past the Carrick shoal on a Tuesday. We kept the lamp turning for eleven hours with the glass falling like a stone, and nobody slept. At first light the cutter came round the point with her mast gone and four men lashed to the rail. I counted them twice from the gallery. Then I took the pen from the drawer and, below the wind and the tide, drew a little man with his arms flung up, a loop of a heart above his head because that was how my brother used to draw us, and under him I wrote one word: ALIVE.

Pell found it at noon and went red to the collar. He said the log was a legal document and a child's doodle would hang us both before any inquiry. I said it was a count, the same as the rest of it. He told me to scrub it. I said I would scrub it when he showed me, in the regulations, where a count of men had to be a tally of drowned ones. He did not look up from his ledger for an hour.

Nobody has scrubbed it. Forty-odd years on, the figure has faded to the colour of weak tea, but the arms are still up, and every time the boats come home the new lamp boys draw one beneath the last. The old harbour men call it the cheering page. I have never told them it started as a sum.