Black and grey photo of a shaded skull wearing a chef's hat over crossed knives on the upper back, with the script words Mise en Place and a small cupcake above it on the neck.

Chef skull and crossed knives with script on neck

Traditional · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of the back of a neck and upper back. A shaded skull wearing a chef's hat sits above two crossed knives, with soft grey shading on the hat and bone. Above it, the script words Mise en Place are written in bold black lettering beside a small outlined cupcake.

Traditional Lettering Neck Back Skull Cupcake Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Vernon never let anybody touch the knives until everything else was in its place. Onions sliced into a steel tray, buns split and stacked, the cupcakes cooling in their paper cases on the back shelf. Mise en place, he called it, rolling the vowels like he'd picked them up on a ferry to Calais, though he'd never been further than the Dover bus. We ran the burger and cake van at Hollin Green Fair for eleven summers, pulling up in whatever car park the council could spare, the generator coughing under the fryer every time the wind came off the dodgems.

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The year I turned seventeen he tied an apron on me and told me to keep my hands busy and my mouth shut. I learned the rhythm of it. Knife in the right hand, thumb tucked back, peppers diced before the queue reached the sign. He never once let me see him falter, not even the August the carousel caught fire two fields over and we served forty teas to firemen without the lights going out. The skull in a chef's hat was stitched in grey thread on his apron pocket, soft with washing, and he said it was the only honest badge in the trade: everybody ends up in the pot one day.

The last fair before the van was sold, a gale took the marquee down at four in the morning. Vernon was gone by then, a stroke in March, and I was the only one left to pack up. I did it his way. I wrapped the knives in a tea towel, stacked the trays, and wiped the counter until the steel showed grey under the bulb. Then, because nobody was watching, I laid out the cupcakes in a row on a clean cloth, one iced pink for each summer he'd had me. I set the knives crossed beside them and stood back, and for a minute everything was exactly where it should be.