Black ink drawing of a tribal-style crescent band with a shaded flower on a grey background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal crescent band with flower

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a crescent-shaped band filled with bold geometric panels, cross motifs, zigzags and dotted rows. A shaded five-petalled flower sits at the upper right edge of the band, with a circular medallion behind it. The linework is crisp and even on pale grey paper, with the ink and shading in black and grey only.

Blackwork Flower Crescent Band Zigzag Geometric pattern Medallion

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and leave that kettle alone until I've finished. Ruth Pascoe was the last boat out of Porthkennack that November, and she went with her mother's chalk cross on the cuff of her oilskin and a tin lamp swinging from the wheelhouse hook. The lamp had a brass cap pressed into a five-petalled flower, and the men said it was the only thing aboard worth stealing.

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The sea came up before noon, the way it does when the glass has been lying to you all week. By three o'clock the fleet was scattered like dropped buttons, and the harbour wall had gone grey as slate. Ruth could not see the marker posts for the spray, so she steered by the swell itself, counting the zigzag humps that rolled under the hull the way you'd count the teeth of a comb. Every ninth one, she said, came from the north, and you could feel it in your back teeth before it lifted you.

Somewhere past the Hen Rock the wheel jammed and the lamp went out. She sat in the dark with her hand on the spokes and waited for the cross on her cuff to mean something. Then the moon came through a split in the cloud, thin and bent like a sickle, and it lit the buoy posts one by one, each marked with its white cross. She followed them in like stepping stones across a flooded field.

She was the last boat in that night, and the first thing she did was climb to the wall and hang the lamp back on its hook, flower cap turned to the sea. Nobody argued with her after that. You can still see the brass flower in the window of the Ship, if you look. Now, Davey, the kettle.