Yellow heart with script lyric tattoo

Her son Tobias had gone over the rail off the Horn. The mate said the sea took him clean, with no body and no bell. Marrit did not weep at the rail. She sat on a coil of hemp with the tin between her boots and painted a heart on the foredeck planking, a fat yellow heart outlined in red, the way children draw them on slates.

Then she wrote across it with a stub of charcoal, the letters leaning like tired sailors. They were the words Tobias used to sing when the watch went slack: because you're mine, I walk the line. He sang them to make the men laugh, because a sailor walks a line of rope or a line of canvas on the yardarm and never once thinks of love until he is far from home.

The captain ordered the deck scrubbed by Sunday. Nobody scrubbed it. By the next dog watch the paint had dried hard in the sun, and the men took to touching the heart before they climbed aloft, one finger on the wood, the way you might knock a door for luck. When they raised the coast of Cornwall, the ship came in on a course so straight that the pilot swore the wind had been steering it.