Back view of a person with arms raised and hands on their head, showing black and grey tattoos on both forearms and a slogan print on a black denim jacket.

Black and grey forearm tattoos with raised arms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person is photographed from behind with both arms raised and hands resting on the head, showing dense tattoos across both forearms and hands. The forearm tattoos are in black and grey, with shaded and detailed areas and some script visible on the right arm, though the designs are partly obscured. The black denim jacket carries a white printed slogan on the back and the background is plain white.

Forearm Hand Hand Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chandler wanted his name in gold leaf across the shop window and wanted it by Saturday, so I was up the ladder at six with a size-two brush and a tin of gilder's size. Mr Pryce, who taught me the trade in a shed behind the fish market, always said gold was a sin until noon and a blessing after, and he should know. He had lettered half the hulls in Ferrin Quay before his hands gave out.

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What I remember most is the board he kept above his bench, a scrap of oak with a line painted along its edge in faded red: 'No saints without sinners'. He never explained it. When I asked, he only tapped the wood and said the men who hauled nets off the Quay needed reminding more than any parson did. Then he went back to his pots of ochre and wouldn't say another word about it until the pub opened.

That Saturday I laid the gold a shade too far left and had to scrape it, and while I was scraping, the chandler's wife came out with a tea tray and read the window from the street. She laughed till she had to set the tray down on a bollard. I had lettered the whole name in reverse, so from the quay it read clean and proper, and from inside the shop it was all backwards. She made me leave it. Thirty years on, the window is still there, and when the early boats come in and the light catches the glass, you can read it from the water, which is the only way anyone ever reads anything in Ferrin Quay.