Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares.

 

[Old Thunder]

Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon.

 

[Old Thunder]

But at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks.

 

[Old Thunder]

They were stains of some sort or other.

 

[Old Thunder]

At first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me.

 

[Old Thunder]

I remembered a story of a white man -- a whaleman too -- who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them.

 

[Old Thunder]

I concluded that this harpooner, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure.

 

[Old Thunder]

And what is it, thought I, after all!

 

[Old Thunder]

It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.

 

[Old Thunder]

But then, what to make of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely independent of the squares of tattooing.