Close photo of a small black fine line lettering tattoo reading "// you're alive //" on the upper arm.

"You're alive" lettering on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of an arm showing a single line of black text reading "// you're alive //" in a clean sans-serif typeface, with double slashes at each end. The lettering is crisp and even, sitting horizontally across the middle of the upper arm against lightly tanned skin. The background is softly out of focus, with the framing focused on the tattoo and the skin around it.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The teleprinter at Saltcombe Harbour Office had been silent since the gale, so when the strip of paper began to chatter at ten past two, you took it for the old drum sticking again. You tore the tape off with cold fingers and read it under the bulb. The Marigold Rose, out past the breakwater, had lost her engine and her skipper's voice, and she was drifting toward the Shingle Bar on the ebb.

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You sent the acknowledgement, then the question, then the one that mattered, the words the coastguard always wanted first. Nothing came back for four minutes. You counted them on the clock above the door, the minute hand dragging as if it had weight on it.

Then the tape stuttered and the reply came up in capitals, typed the way the young deckhand had been taught on the boat's set: // YOU'RE ALIVE //. Slashes at either end, like the marks a clerk puts round a thing that must not be lost. Your hand shook on the key. You typed back the only thing a harbour man could say, which was the lifeboat's bearing and the word GO.

Morning brought the Rose in on the flood, listing hard, with two men wrapped in foil on her deck and a third shouting about his bloody boots. You kept the tape. Years later it still hangs in the office beside the tide tables, the words gone faint at the edges, and nobody asks why you won't throw it out.