Two solid black vertical bars tattooed across a man's upper back, with fine text lines down his upper arm, in a blackwork style.

Two solid black bars across upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man wearing a black knit cap is photographed from behind, showing two solid black vertical bars tattooed side by side across his upper back. Thin vertical lines of small text run down the outer edge of his upper arm, and a small mark is visible near his other elbow. The bars are dense black ink with crisp edges on a plain, pale wall background, and the composition is centred on the back.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the range and mind the kettle, it's been on since Tuesday. Nobody on the Marigold ever drank a cup that wasn't stewed to tar, and I'll not have you spoil the one good habit we had.

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Now, the bars. Old Hobday, the cook before me, painted two black stripes on the bulkhead beside the spice rack. Not for decoration. Every watch he'd go over them again with a rag and a pot of lamp black, so the edges stayed sharp as a razor. Two bars, no more. The men asked what they meant, and he said they were the two doors of the galley, the one you come in by and the one you leave by, and a cook who knows which is which never gets lost in a gale.

Then the winter we lost the Gannet off the Skerries, Hobday stopped painting. He'd stand in front of that wall with the rag hanging from his fist. When the mate asked him why, he said he'd only ever counted the doors wrong. There was one more than he'd reckoned, and it was the one nobody came back through.

So when the new lad came aboard, quiet and keeping to the far end of the table, I looked at him and thought of those bars. Some men carry their doors with them. Go on, drink your tea. It's bitter, and that's how you'll know it's honest.

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