Black fine-line script lettering tattoo running vertically down the nape and upper back of a person with short hair.

Vertical script tattoo down the nape

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with short, layered hair, showing a column of thin black script running down the centre of the back of the neck. The linework is fine and even, and the letters are set in a single vertical line on smooth, lightly lit skin. The composition is tightly cropped on the neck and shoulder, with a dark grey top in the lower right and a blurred background.

Lettering Fine line Neck Back Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink ran out on the third day out from Skerrow, so Ennis Dacre mixed soot from the galley lamp into a spoon of fish oil and kept writing. The harbour clerk had asked him to set down the names of the crew, one under the other, so the sea would know who was owed a wage if it came to that. He wrote them down the page in a single column, because his mother had always said a list read clearer going down than across, and because there was no room for a second column on a ship's ledger that size.

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On the ninth night the wind took the foresail, and the captain, a man called Haskett who trusted nothing he could not weigh, said the paper was bad luck and should go over the side with the spare rope. Tobin, who was ten and had never been let near the chart table, stood between him and the rail with the lamp held high. He said the sea could not read, so it would not care what the paper said. Ennis agreed with him, and said that was exactly why the names had to be written so plainly that a drowning man could find his own.

Haskett did not throw it over. He took the ledger from the boy and read it by the swinging light, slowly, as if each name were a rope he had to test. Near the bottom he stopped. Ennis had written the boat's own name there, at the end of the column, though no one had asked him to, and beneath it a single line of wet ink that had not been there before the storm.

At dawn the wind dropped and the sea went flat as a plate. Haskett kept the ledger folded inside his coat from then on, and when they came into Skerrow he let the clerk read every name aloud from top to bottom. He never said whether he believed in luck, but he gave the boy the lamp to hold at every watch after that.