The Adriatic was a four-mast, four steam-engine, Harland & Wolff built monster. She’d run the Atlantic for twenty-five years since her Belfast birth, ferrying immigrants, cargo and the wealthy backwards and forwards to the new world, when she wasn’t vacationing in the Mediterranean, and she’d seen every kind of weather. She’d held Russians and Polish Jews, Lithuanians and Czechoslovakians, who first made passage through the North Sea and took a train to reach her, and thousands of Irish Catholics who took steamers from their native ports to Liverpool docks. She held oil, and coal, the belongings of many nations, and occasionally lowing, bleating cattle. The rich luxuriated in her polished dining rooms, or the indoor pool, the Turkish bath, while the poor were sent down towards the lower decks, near her two propellers, where the noise of her motion was mature and continuous. She was the last of the Big Four vessel quartet run by White Star liners, a fine old lady retired in her later years now to the summer transatlantic passage. In May of 1933 Cyril Parks boarded her, one year before the Cunard — White Star merger, one year before she would be laid up permanently then sold to the Japanese and broken up for parts. To Cy she was magnificent, simply because she was whole and moving. He’d seen so many battered, wrecked and ravaged vessels out at Ward’s Ship-breakers — they looked like noble prehistoric beasts bonded and tortured — that the Adriatic was miraculous in her capacity and condition. At first her groans and internal knocking and the noise of her robust metallic sashaying left him uneasy, for it seemed that parts of the structure were unhappy in their bolted proximity with each other and were trying to separate. Then it became apparent that she was simply living, her sounds became the music of a giant iron body, breathing, digesting, beating, and it was comforting. The wake behind the ship was tremendous, like Moby Dick spouting water through a blow-hole. Almost three thousand passengers doing seventeen knots had their hats tugged off by the ocean breeze when they came out to grip the railing, to bid farewell to the continent slipping away behind them, or to play shuffleboard on the middle decks. They were citizens of a small city floating out to a promised land.
There was work for Cy on board the ship, more work than he ever imagined or expected, in the third-class cabins and the sailors’ quarters, many wanted motifs done, to celebrate new beginnings, or finished struggles. And with both of these sentiments Cyril Parks could certainly sympathize. In his suitcase he had his equipment and four books of bound-together manila flash, Riley’s designs cut down from the walls of the shop and his own never before displayed pictures. Each page was dedicated to a certain theme, skulls, hearts, lovelies. That which had covered the walls of the parlour could now fit in a large pocket. He set up a little station on F deck where they came to him and waited their turn, browsing through the notebooks, often pointing to a tattoo without knowing the English word for it, writing the names of loved ones down on scraps of paper so that he could spell them out with unfamiliar letters and etch it through a heart. So that left-behind wives or sweethearts or daughters were not so very much forgotten.
The Adriatic’s sailors went in for women, patriotism, and souvenirs. Codes. Their codes were precise and adhered to as men of the navy, there were rules at sea, similar to those which would only permit a soldier to wear a medal if it had been won in service. There were anchors for crossing the Atlantic, turtles for passing the equator, and dragons for being stationed in China. Often barnyard animals on the balls of their fists, which was an old, old tradition that still prevailed, animals that liked to keep dry and would scramble out of water quickly in a panic should they need to. Roosters. Pigs. It was ugly flash, but Cy was nobody to deny a man his superstition. The men followed strict, professional qualifications, would not have a mark done without having earned credit for it and they wanted to assure him of entitlement with stories of voyages as he prepared and stencilled their shoulder.
— When I crossed to the Cape with Blue Flue we hit a storm so big it put us back a week. A week I tell you, in this day and age, isn’t it madness. The thing would not let up. Not that I’m complaining, mind, I thought my number was being called. Waves bigger man Cader Idris, I tell no lie.
It was honour and accomplishment. It was a maritime record like a ship’s log. When Cy first apprenticed with Eliot Riley, Riley had told him that he’d been tattooing so long he’d even done a few hold and fast tattoos on the knuckles of old-timeys on sailing ships and clippers. As if he’d been born before the age of steam! Riley could have shipped ice to the North Pole though, until he got too drunk to make feasible his lying.
The shop in Morecambe had witnessed its fair share of naval customers. They were the old uncles and true souls of the industry, perhaps the rational explanation of Riley’s riparian assertion that tattooists gravitate to water. Here on board the ship there were old retired navy boys, who had sailed with the empire’s fleets since before the war and during, who had come back to the country with the decorations of the world, Japanese love-dots and ukiyo-e, traditional south hemisphere markings, and now they couldn’t stop dressing up their skin. They came to him and filled up the last little pieces of clear flesh with ornamentation. Some of their existing work had even been done using a woodcut technique with the ink chipped and rubbed in, but with all the vernacular skill that Cy had not possessed when Riley demanded he do it to his own leg. These tattoos were primitive, effective, beautiful, in his time at Morecambe he had even seen some done on faces, Maori moko style, though Cy knew that took a man who had lost something of his country to the different one, as if he knew his blood was journeying wrong and he was trying to find its source. The old sea-travellers who had collected foreign marks were exotic, alligator-skinned men, men who had passed through a spiritual threshold and met something sacred head-on in the delirium of pain. They were strong, strong in their discomfort, strong in their minds, men for whom the tapping of ink blocks into skin might in their heads become the beat of a song, clung to like a chanty to get them through the strenuous endeavour. It was true engraving, disparate at the edges so you could know it was a deep art, deeper than it needed to be for permanence — the colour and the scar coming together in something ritualistic. This was the most painful method of tattooing Cy knew of, and he knew of it all right as Eliot Riley got him to begin his training that way, raking off skin on his shins with that piece of blacked bamboo and a mason’s mallet, not sixteen years old and already scarred up like a battle-torn soldier. Having to hammer ink down on to his bone before he got anywhere near the helpful electric needle or exaction. The pure agony had him hating Riley, hating the man for the pedantic devils within him, the humiliation of that initial pedigree, and for crying in front of his master who had knelt with his hands pushing down on Cy’s feet, roaring at him to continue when the pain got too much, slapping his face softly like he was a blathering girl. Yes, he could respect these men, these sailors and travellers who’d seen the method through to the full torso pattern, black nippled, with knots of red along their hipbones and thighs, backbones crackling like the spine of a lizard. Because the pain was immeasurable, the blood loss was fantastic and any infection could be lasting, occasionally deadly if it wasn’t treated quick enough. Sailors had sometimes come into Pedder Street with whole stories on their backs, right down to their calves. Maps of where they’d been without the need for countries, or seas. There were the markings of Japan, New Zealand, Fiji. He would try to decipher what had been put on them. He would pull away a shirt and sit and smoke a cigarette and interpret them, respectfully, before he started adding anything else.