Close-up of fine black script lettering running vertically across a shoulder and upper arm, in a lettering style.

Vertical script lettering on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a vertical line of cursive script in black ink running down the shoulder and upper arm. The linework is thin and even, with the letters joined in a flowing handwritten style, and the text is partly cut off at the top of the frame. The skin tone is warm and the background is softly out of focus, so the lettering is the clear focal point.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Upper arm Script Lettering Word Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on the bollard, the wind off the quay won't trouble you there. My grandfather Hal Mercer kept the lamp at Skerrie Point for thirty-one years, and every winter he wrote to the ship's agent in the same slanting, looped hand, so the clerks in Kilnmouth knew his letters before they opened them.

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The last one came in the February of the big freeze. The agent's boy brought it up the hill tucked in a sack of coal, and my gran read it on the step with the door open and the snow coming in. Hal had gone north on the sealer Margaret Rose to chart the ice, and the letter was three lines long. It said the Arctic Ocean had closed behind them like a hand, that the cook was singing hymns in the forecastle, and that he would be home before the herring.

She never answered it. There was no pen in the house that would take ink without blotting, and she said a woman who couldn't write a proper hand oughtn't to write at all. So she carried the letter to the schoolmaster's wife, who copied each word out in curling copperplate on the back of a calendar, slow as threading a needle.

The Margaret Rose came back in April with two men missing and Hal's hand bandaged to the wrist. He never read the copy. He kept it folded in his breast pocket until he died, and when the undertaker opened his coat they found the paper soft as cloth, the ink gone grey, and in the margin, in her own careful pencil, the only line she ever wrote to him: Come home by the herring, you great fool.