Close-up of a traditional style tattoo of a red strawberry with green leaves and a small cream flower on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Strawberry and flower on skin

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A red strawberry with green leaves and a small cream five-petalled flower with a dark centre, set against a skin background. Bold black outlines define the shapes, the strawberry is filled with flat red and dark seed dashes, and a partial dark floral design is visible in the top right corner.

Traditional Other Strawberry Flower Leaves Fruit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobiah Penrose, cook's boy on the barque Marigold, had been told by old Mother Hask that nothing grew at sea but trouble. She kept a tin of seed in the galley all the same, wrapped in oilcloth beside the salt pork, and she would not say why.

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In the fourth month out the sugar ran short and the men went grey around the gums. Mother Hask took a cracked dish, scraped the salt from the rail, and pressed a single runner from the tin into it. Each morning Tobiah carried fresh water up from the scuttle butt and poured it on with a spoon, and each morning the leaves were a little wider, a green as bright as the paint on the captain's gig.

The first flower opened the day they raised the Azores, a cream star with a dark eye at its heart. Then came a berry, hard and pale, which swelled and reddened over three days while the wind dropped and the sea lay flat as a plate. Mother Hask would not let anyone pick it. A thing that grows in the galley belongs to the galley, she said, and the men could wait their turn.

On the last night before port the berry was ripe. Tobiah held it in his palm, the seeds pricking his thumb, and the cook nodded towards the bunk where the sick mate lay. He cut it in four with the bread knife and carried the pieces forward, one for each man on the watch. Ashore, Mother Hask planted the runner in a window box in Bristol, and the salt air never got another berry out of it.