Black and grey stylised lettering forming an armband tattoo around the upper arm, shown against a white sleeve.

Black lettering armband on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A wide band of ornate, stylised capital letters wraps around the upper arm, with thick black outlines and shaded infill. The letters are hard to read clearly and have swirling, flowing strokes. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin and a white sleeve, with a dark background.

Lettering Upper arm Lettering Letter Armband

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ivy Marrable had been told the letters were to be ornate, not legible, and she had taken that as a kind of permission. Mr Teague wanted his nursery's name carved in a band of oak that wrapped the gatepost at Hollins Lane, and he wanted it to look like something off a ship's figurehead. So she drew the capitals fat and looping, let the tail of the R curl back on itself, and tucked the K inside the D until it looked like a fish swallowing a key.

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The trouble came on the Thursday, when the frost had lifted and the whole garden smelled of wet bark. Teague walked the path with his hands in his coat and stopped at the gate. He squinted for a long time. "Is that meant to say Redkirk," he asked, "or Kedrick?"

Ivy wiped her brush on her apron. "Both," she said, and then, because he kept squinting, "whichever you were told as a boy."

He laughed then, properly, the way he hadn't since the spring. He said his wife had always called the place Dredwick, after a village she'd half-remembered from a childhood holiday, and that he had never once corrected her in thirty years.

Ivy went back to the gatepost that afternoon with a finer brush and softened the K. By dusk the letters held together as a word, the first real word she had ever given a client, and it was not the one on his paperwork. Teague read it twice, nodded, and went inside without a word, leaving the gate open to the wet lane.