Two vertical lines of black block lettering tattooed down the front of a person's lower legs, with the left reading YOU MAY NOT REMEMBER and the right reading BUT ILL NEVER FORGET.

Two-line quote down the shins

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A person sits with knees raised and lower legs facing the camera, showing two vertical lines of black block capital lettering on the shins. The left line reads YOU MAY NOT REMEMBER and the right reads BUT ILL NEVER FORGET, with even spacing between the letters. The ink is solid black on a light skin tone, set against a white t-shirt and a plain background.

Lettering Calf Quote Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me that ladle and sit where the range can warm your back, because this is the tale of the Ada Lensing and the cook who came down from her topsail with his memory knocked clean out of him. Forty days out from Falmouth, Jem Carrow slipped on wet rope and hit the deck like a dropped sack of flour. He woke up asking who had left the bread in the rain.

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The surgeon from Cadiz said he might never recover the names of the crew, and most men would have let him drift. Not Tobias Wren, the ship's boy who had grown into a bosun's mate with ink on his fingers. Every evening he sat on an upturned bucket beside Jem's hammock and read aloud from the log: the names of the dead and the living, the day the flying fish landed on the galley step, the tally of biscuits and the state of the pump.

Jem wept at the wrong parts and laughed at the wrong jokes, but he listened. In the third week Tobias said, You may not remember any of this, Jem, and Jem answered, Then tell it again, and I'll pretend it's new. So Tobias began chalking each day's tally on the beam above the stove, where the lamp could catch it, so his friend would have something to read when the watch changed and the nights grew long.

When we raised the Azores, Jem stood at the rail, squinted at a gull, and said Wren before anyone had told him. Tobias never mentioned it. He just went below, fetched the chalk, and wrote one more line under the old ones, the way he always did, for a man who might one day need to read it.