Two matching black tattoos on the inner wrists: the word Beauty in flowing script on one wrist and BEAST in angular blackletter capitals on the other.

Beauty and Beast wrist lettering

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two hands held palms out towards the camera, each with a black tattoo of a single word on the inner wrist. The left wrist reads Beauty in a flowing script with looped capitals, while the right wrist reads BEAST in bold, angular blackletter-style capitals. Both designs are solid black ink with no shading or colour, and they sit side by side in a close, evenly lit composition.

Lettering Forearm Beast Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The signwriter at Braunston asks which boat gets which word, and you realise he expects you to already know. Beauty is the long pale narrowboat with the geraniums in tins along her roof. Beast is the squat working tug with the brown hull, the one you have to lean into to steer. Tie them nose to tail and the Grand Union lets you lock through as a pair, which is the only reason anyone bothers with two boats at all.

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Ruth, who owns both, watches your face and laughs. "Mother's joke," she says, wiping a brush on a rag. "Her idea of romance." Then the paddles lift, the water boils white under the gates, and the two hulls rise together, the tug grumbling in its throat while the pretty boat knocks against its side like a dog wanting to be let in.

On the long pound past Napton, Ruth tells you the truth. The tug was Beauty for thirty years, sleek and quick on the Trent, until the winter flood when she was the only thing that could shove a stranded hull off the bank. The pretty boat was christened Beast the summer she pulled a drowned cow from the lock cill, and no one had the heart to change it back. Names, Ruth says, only stick to whichever boat is doing the work.

At Hatton, with the light going orange on the cut, you take the brush from the tin and repaint the tug's bow in sharp black capitals, angular as broken ice. The paint is still wet when the lock keeper shouts you forward, and you have to hold the lettering up to the sky to see that it reads true.