The InkTide Vessel

Hauled from a tidewater graveyard where the marked hulls were run aground on purpose. The body is banded in carved striation — swells cut in relief, foam curling ridged and pale against a bruised field. A swallow rides mid-flight on either flank, wings pinned open, its outline gouged deep enough to hold shadow at any hour. Stars pock the hull like old scar tissue. The wheelhouse sits squat and weathered above it all, portholes hollowed straight through to nothing. Every sailor who crossed five thousand miles earned a swallow inked into his skin. Every sailor who never came back had one cut into the hull instead — a debt the vessel carried in his place, a soul it was obliged to ferry. The marked ships were said to hold what the sea refused to give up. When a hull filled with swallows, the crew burned it to the waterline and laid a new keel before dawn. Each layer is laid down as a line, the way a needle lays down a line. The strata don't bury the mark. They are the mark.