Black and grey lettering tattoo reading Destroy what destroys you across two lines on the inner wrist, above a grey sleeve cuff.

Two-line quote on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a two-line phrase, Destroy what destroys you, tattooed in uneven capital letters across the inner wrist. The lettering is dark, slightly irregular and hand-drawn in appearance, with the second line set lower and angled. The monochrome image shows the wrist and part of the palm against a dark background with a grey knitted sleeve at the bottom edge.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Word Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flour was gone again by the third watch, and Hannah Pell stood in the galley with a lantern and a cold ladle, counting the holes in the sacks. Eleven, then twelve. The rats had found the seam where the bread room met the hold, and they worked it every night like careful tailors.

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Cook Abel Crane had carved a saying into the beam above the range before the sea took him off the Horn. Four words cut with a marlinspike: destroy what destroys you. Hannah had thought it a strange motto for a galley. She baited traps with salt pork. She packed the seam with tarred rope. She sat up with Mrs Ruddock, the ship's cat, who ate the bait and grew fat and sulky on it.

On the eleventh night she followed the wet. It ran from the pump in a thin dark line, under the galley floor and out past the bread room, and the flour at the far end had gone to paste. The rats were only eating what the water had already spoiled. The thing spoiling the ship's bread was a split plank under the pump, and she had spent a month killing the wrong creatures.

She pulled the boards up at dawn and drove oakum into the split with the heel of a ladle. When the mate came down, she was on her knees with a tallow candle, and above her the old carving looked back at them both. Beneath it, with the same spike, she cut a smaller line, crooked and shallow: and the water too.