Camera and smile script on a forearm
Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
A fine line tattoo of a camera outline with a heart in the lens, followed by the word smile in joined script. The linework is thin and even across a pale forearm against a dark background. The photograph is black and white, so the ink reads as black and grey.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Mum, the man at the camera fair in Leeds swore the body had been looked after, but the strap was cracked and someone had wrapped the lens cap in parcel tape. I paid forty quid and didn't haggle, which you'll say was my first mistake. I'm writing this on the back of the receipt because the café on Briggate is closing and the chairs are already upturned.
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Inside was a roll of film, wound back to the start, and a folded strip of contact prints tucked under the base plate. Someone had circled three frames in pencil. Each one showed a woman on a bench by the canal with a scruffy dog that wouldn't hold still, one ear up, one ear down. In the last frame she has laughed so hard she's squinting, and a small heart has been drawn in biro over the lens, as if the photographer wanted it to be there.
I took the film to the chemist on Kirkgate, which still develops it, though the lad at the counter had never seen a negative and held it to the light like a banknote. Forty-two pictures. Most are of that bench. Nobody I know, nobody I'm supposed to find. I keep wondering whether the photographer ever got the dog to sit.
I've taped the best print above the kettle. Each morning I say smile to it, the way you used to in the hallway before the flash went off, and the woman on the bench looks back as if she's just remembered a joke she isn't going to tell me.
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