Black fine line tattoo of three open books labelled Fig 1, Fig 2 and Fig 3, stacked across the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three open books on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three open books are drawn one above another across the inner wrist, each labelled with a small caption reading Fig 1, Fig 2 and Fig 3. The linework is thin and even black outline with little or no shading, and the figures sit against plain skin. The tattoo is shown in black ink on a light skin tone, with the hand clenched in the upper part of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Open book Book Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook Mabry kept the ship's receipts in a sea-chest under the bread bin, three books bound in tarred canvas, and she would not let the boys touch them. Before every port the captain asked what she meant to put in the pot, and she would open the first book, run her thumb down the margin, and say nothing until the bread had proved.

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The first book was plain. Fig 1 showed the way to lay a loaf on the sill to cool, and the way to lay a fish on the board so its spine kept straight. The second book had a bear in it. Nobody believed her about the bear until the winter the stores went damp and the men were eating biscuit with weevils in it. She opened Fig 2, and a pale creature the shape of a seal's head lifted itself out of the crease and sniffed. It took the sour barrel down to the hold and came back with the salt pork sweet as the day it was cured.

The third book was for when the ship itself went wrong. Fig 3 showed a hand, two fingers pinching a corner of the page and drawing it back. Mabry only used it once, the night the rudder jammed off the headland, and the boys swore afterwards that she had lifted a page and the sea had turned aside to let them through, like a door opening on hinges.

Mabry died in Lisbon with the books still under the bin. The captain's nephew found them, read the captions aloud, and sold the lot to a man who said he collected old instructions. The stores went sour the next winter, and nobody on the ship could say which page they had been missing.