Clapperboard on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black outline tattoo of an open clapperboard sits on the inner wrist, with the striped top arm raised at an angle and three short lines beside it suggesting movement. The linework is bold and even, and the grid of boxes and bars on the board is left as unshaded skin. The tattoo is in black ink only, set against plain, evenly lit skin with no background detail.

Forearm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found the seams of every box on my stall by eleven, so I kept the slate under my coat and sold only the cheap things: tin lunchboxes, a brass trombone with a dent, a jar of loose buttons. The slate was not for sale. It was black and white, the striped arm gone soft at the hinge, and a props man in Walsall had given it to me for a bottle of Scotch and a promise to keep it out of anyone's hands who wanted it for décor.

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In the summer of 1978 I was nineteen and the only person on Margate pier who could hold a slate steady. Teddy Vos wanted one shot of the sea coming in under a grey sky, no actors, just the water and a girl walking out to meet it. The rain machine broke at four. Teddy shouted for the clapper, and I snapped the arm shut so the sound would sit exactly on the frame where the first wave broke. He said it was the cleanest sync of the whole picture, and he was not a man who said things like that.

The film was never finished. Teddy's money went into the arcade's new penny slots, and the reels sat in a biscuit tin in my hall for forty years, the sound and the picture kept apart like two people who had quarrelled on a platform.

A boy with a wet fringe stopped at the stall and asked what the thing was for. I lifted the arm and let it fall. Clack. 'So everything starts together,' I told him, and he nodded as if that were a fair deal, then walked off into the rain still clapping his hands.