Sheet of twelve dark red Chinese character designs on white, each labelled in English with words such as Music, Peace, Mother and Father.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chinese character tattoo flash sheet

Colour · Flash

A grid of twelve Chinese characters arranged in four rows of three, each with an English label beneath it. The characters are drawn in a bold, solid dark red with uniform strokes on a plain white background. The layout is even and evenly spaced, with the larger Blood & Guts character in the centre of the third row.

Chinese character Music Blood Mother Peace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold Lam had typed the captions himself on a Brother typewriter older than his niece, and by the time the first proof came off the press in Limehouse he had read the sheet twice without spotting anything wrong. The characters had come from a master in Kowloon, bold and dark as dried plums: twelve small squares, four rows of three, each with its English word beneath. It was meant to hang in the window of the print shop on Narrow Street, where the summer tourists stopped to photograph anything written in a foreign hand.

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Mei saw it first, standing at the counter with her school bag still on one shoulder. She ran a finger along the second row and laughed until she had to sit on the stool. "Honesty is Madman," she said. "And Clever's under the drum." The typist had shuffled the labels like a card trick, and nobody could say how long the sheet had been wrong. Harold thought of the man who had come in last Tuesday asking for a drum, and wondered what he had gone home with.

They spent the evening with a ruler and a bottle of correction fluid, sliding the captions back into their places. Mei read each character aloud in Cantonese, Harold wrote the English in pencil first and then in ink, the way his own father had taught him to sign receipts. By nine the last word was dry, and she held the proof up to the lamp, where the red characters glowed through the paper like embers.

Harold pinned the sheet above the counter with four brass tacks. Mei squinted at the bottom row, where Father sat in the middle and Peace in the corner. "Still looks like a mistake to me," she said. Harold tapped the glass. "Close enough," he said, and went to put the kettle on.