Stitch sitting beside the word Ohana

Lettering · Colour · Flash

A small blue cartoon creature with large dark eyes and long ears sits with its back partly turned, beside the handwritten word OHANA with a full stop. The character is shaded with soft blue washes and pink highlights on the ears, with fine dark outlines around the lettering. The cream background is plain and the composition places the figure on the left and the word on the right.

Lettering Stitch Cartoon character Ohana Lettering Creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The creature arrived on the Thursday the lock keeper went home with his ankle, sitting on the coal hatch of the barge Marigold as though it had paid the toll. It was blue, the colour of a gas flame at the bottom, with ears like folded envelopes and eyes so wide and dark that Dad refused to look at them for a whole week. We called it Ohana because Mum had read that word on a tea packet and said it meant nobody gets left behind, and because the creature kept sitting with its back half turned to us, as if it were waiting to be asked.

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Nobody asked. Dad grumbled about the mooring fees and the pigeons. My brother Tomas tried to name it Gerald. The creature ate a whole sponge cake off the cabin roof, then went to sleep against the chimney pipe where the warmth came up. When the flood came down from Hebden in March and the towpath went under, Mum woke us at three and we bailed by torchlight, buckets passing hand to hand. The creature was gone by then. I thought it had swum off with the rest of the debris.

At dawn we found it on the lock gate, soaked, ears flat, one paw hooked round the mooring line we had lost in the night. It had been hauling that rope back to the bollard all night, inch by inch, so the barge would not swing out over the weir. Dad took his cap off. Tomas said Gerald would have been proud, and the creature looked over its shoulder at us with those enormous eyes, the way it always did, as if to check we had all come out.

We tied up properly after that. Dad painted OHANA on the stern in careful black capitals with a full stop, because he said a family ought to be finished with a word. The creature still sits on the coal hatch with its back turned, watching the locks, waiting for the rest of us to get in line.