Traditional-style colour tattoo on a calf showing a stormtrooper helmet, a grey Death Star, a pink galaxy, green leaves and banners reading We're all fine here now and Thank you, how are you.

Stormtrooper, Death Star and banners on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a stormtrooper helmet in front of a grey Death Star, with a pink and red galaxy background, green leaves and a laurel-style wreath. Bold black outlines define the forms, with soft grey shading on the helmet and planet and flat colour in the banners. The design is framed by curved and straight scrolls carrying lettering above and below the central motif.

Traditional Calf Stormtrooper Death star Galaxy Leaves Wreath Banner Scroll Lettering Helmet Star wars

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nineteen days out of Valparaíso and the Mercy Anstruther has gone quiet in the way long-haul ships do, the swell doing all the talking. You keep the night watch in the wireless cabin behind the chartroom, a tin box of valves that smells of hot dust. At two bells you turn the dial past the frequencies the company told you to leave alone, and somewhere south of the Horn, someone always answers.

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Tonight it is the Halcyon Dune, a tanker with a flat, careful operator who sends each word as if he has checked it twice. You ask after their fuel and their list. "We're all fine here now," he says, and the hiss of the sea rises in the gap that follows. "Thank you. How are you?" You tell him the truth, that the cook has burned the bread again and the mate has taken to singing hymns badly before breakfast. He laughs, one dry syllable through the static, and you realise you have not heard anyone laugh in a week.

After that you keep the watch together. He reads you the weather from his bridge, you tell him about the albatross that has followed the stern for four days, and neither of you mentions the brass sounding ball the cook keeps on the galley shelf, though you both suspect the other has one too.

On the twenty-third night there is only the carrier hum. You sit with your hand on the key until the cabin lamp drowns in dawn. In the watch book you write the log in your neatest capitals, then one line the company will never read: Halcyon Dune, no reply. Still tuned. You leave the dial where it is, so the next watchkeeper will hear the sea and know someone was listening.