Black and grey tattoo of three folded banknote triangles on skin, shown beside a hand tattoo of Family First script lettering on the back of the hand.

Banknote triangles and Family First hand script

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows two tattoos. The left panel has three angular, folded banknote-style shapes with fine outlines and soft grey shading that suggests the portraits and printed denominations. The right panel shows the words Family First in flowing script across the back of a hand, with a swash underline and grey shading behind the lettering.

Lettering Hand Banknote Money Triangle Script Lettering Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, love, and mind the coal scuttle. Your great-uncle Joe never once sat with his back to the lock gates. He came off the cut in 1931 with a narrowboat called Maud, a cough, and three banknotes folded into points. Most men would have spent the lot on the first pint in Braunston. Not Joe, and not his brothers.

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Alf, Ted and Joe pooled their wages from the gasworks to buy Maud, and each folded his share into a triangle before it went in the tin. A folded note is stubborn. You cannot lift one corner without tearing the whole, so they made the rule plain: nobody spent a point without the other two. Ted thought it a joke until the Christmas he tried to prise his loose at the Blue Lion. Joe put one hand flat over it on the bar and said, 'Family first, Teddy, or it's no first at all.'

Then came the winter the ice held the cut for six weeks. The money ran out, then the coal. Ted said they should sell Maud to a man from Rugby and split the difference. Joe said nothing. He unfolded his own triangle, very slowly, smoothing the crease with his thumb, and laid it flat on the table. Alf looked at the portrait looking back at him, then did the same. Ted sat a long while before he unfolded his. None of them could bear to be the one who sold Maud.

Maud is still moored at Braunston, and so am I. The notes sit in a tin under my bunk, three flat squares now, creased like old maps. When the moon's on the water I fold them back into points, slot each corner behind the next, and watch the river turn the little pinwheel round. That's the whole inheritance, love. Put the kettle on.