Black and white photo of a man's hands with blackletter-style lettering tattooed across the fingers and back of the hands, in black ink.

Black lettering tattoos across fingers and hands

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are shown close up, one with a bold script word across the back and individual letters on the fingers, the other with letters on each finger and a larger flourished letter on the back. The linework is solid black with heavy, decorative letterforms and some shading in the thicker strokes. The photograph is monochrome, with the hands framed against a dark jacket and a pale shirt collar.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The gulls have been at the bins again, so I've scrubbed the back step twice this week, and Mrs Reid says the herring boats coming in early have brought them up from the harbour. I'm writing because your mother came round with the parcel you posted from Lerwick. She wouldn't open it, said it was yours to open, so I sat with her at the kitchen table while she unwrapped it. Wool socks, a tin of barley sugar, and a card with a photograph tucked inside. Your hand, flat on a wet deck, the letters across the back in that curly script you always swore you'd grow out of. Then the fingers, one letter each. I'd thought you daft when you had them done the night before you sailed.

Mrs Reid came in while I was still staring at it and took the card from me. She turned it sideways, then upside down, and said, that's not a word, Morag, that's a sentence, and she's right, it isn't. You knew I'd be the one to read it the way I'd read it, left to right with the fingers curled, and not the way the tattooist meant it. I haven't told your mother what I think it says. She's got enough to fret about with the price of coal and that cough of hers.

So I've pinned it above the sink where the light from the window falls. This morning I held my own hand up against the glass, the way you do when you're trying to make out a sign through spray, and I spelled it out letter by letter with my thumb. Then I stood there with my hand still raised while the tide came in and the boats began to show past the breakwater, one small grey shape after another, until I could count them and I still couldn't find yours.

Come home soon and show me the right way round.

Morag

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