Black ink tattoo of four horizontal bands with two Chinese-style characters between them, on a forearm with the sleeve rolled up.

Black bands and characters on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm tattoo made of four solid black horizontal bands, with two stylised characters set between the upper bands. The bands are bold and even, while the characters have finer, more detailed strokes. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the shot is a close, softly focused crop against a weathered brick wall, with a pink shirt and wrist bracelets in the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Lau had the ovens roaring before I got my coat off, and the first thing she told me, as she always did, was that the dough didn't care what the clock said. We worked in the dark with the shutter down, the only light the orange glow through the oven grilles, and the air smelled of yeast and scorched sugar.

Keep reading

The tins were stacked by the back door, each one banded in black paint, four stripes round the middle, so you could tell the loaf tins from the bun tins without reading the labels. Above the shop front were the two characters she'd painted herself the week she signed the lease. When I asked what they said, she gave me a sideways look and said, "Luck, the polite version," and went back to scaling dough on the marble.

In October she flew to Hong Kong for her sister's wedding and left me a list in pencil on the back of a flour sack: knead at four, bake the tins first, never open the back door before the rain stops. I kept that list like scripture for a fortnight. The bread came out a little heavier than hers, a little too dark on the base, and the regulars were kind enough not to say so.

On the last morning I pulled the shutter up at six, and the sun came in low across the pavement in four bright bars, one for each stripe on the tins. The characters over the door caught the light too. I left the spare key under the third tin, the way she'd shown me, and walked home with flour on my cuffs, not hurrying at all.

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