Black and grey lettering tattoo reading Beauty in script above a vertical blackletter BEAST on a forearm.

Beauty and Beast lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the word Beauty in flowing black script with a decorative swash underneath, placed across the upper part of the limb. Below it, the word BEAST runs vertically down the limb in bold blackletter capitals with solid black fill. The tattoo is entirely black ink in shades of grey and black, shown against a dark, slightly desaturated background.

Lettering Forearm Beast Script Blackletter Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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You will not believe the afternoon I have had at the Harrow Bridge post. A man came over on a handcart with a painted trunk, its lid lettered BEAUTY in curling gold with little swirls underneath like a wedding invitation. Down the side, in heavy black letters that looked as if they had been cut with a bread knife, it said BEAST. He had papers for two travellers and only one passport, and when I asked where the other was, he tapped the trunk and said, "Sleeping. She does not like the cold."

I was ready to send him back across the bridge. Then the trunk knocked, twice, from inside, and the lid lifted an inch. A pair of thin hands folded over the edge the way a cat folds its paws, and a voice said, quite politely, that the coffee in our canteen was undrinkable and she would like to see the supervisor. I have worked this crossing for nineteen years and nobody has ever asked me to see the supervisor. I told her the supervisor was me.

She was not a smuggler, Nell, and she was not a fairground act either, whatever the sign-painter had intended. The man, who turned out to be her brother, explained that the lettering was a joke their father had played on them both when they were children: the gold word for the one who would be looked at, the black word for the one who would do the work. They had swapped the labels years ago and never swapped them back. I asked which was which. He only shrugged and said the trunk would tell me, once I had let them through.

I stamped the papers. I could not help myself. Before they wheeled away towards the valley road, she leaned out and pressed a card into my hand. On it, in pencil, she had written the time of the next tide and the words, Mind the ferry, it is always early for the wrong people. I still have it on my desk. Come up at Easter and I will show you.

Love, Margaret