Man in a grey waistcoat and turquoise tie holding an MR sign, with colourful traditional-style tattoos covering both forearms and small tattoos on the fingers.

Colourful sleeve tattoos on forearms holding an MR sign

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A man in a grey waistcoat, white shirt and turquoise tie holds a black MR sign on a wooden stick with both hands at waist height, and his face is cropped out of the frame. Both forearms are covered in bold tattoos with solid outlines and areas of red, orange, green and yellow ink, and several small tattoos sit on his fingers. The outdoor background of green foliage and water is softly blurred, keeping the focus on the arms and hands.

Traditional Forearm Hand Arm tattoo Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lettering had to be right before the paint went on, so Nell Garrity sat on an upturned crate with the board across her knees and counted the strokes under her breath. Outside the workshop window on Dock Street the gulls had gone quiet and the gas lamps were coming on one by one along the wet cobbles. Her father had taught her that an ornate capital wanted three goes at its shadow and never a fourth.

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Mr Okonedo had brought the commission in at six, a wedding sign for a couple from Hull who wanted something to hold up for the photographs. Black board, white border, a swash on the M that curled like the lip of a wave. He stood by the door turning his hat in his hands while she worked, and she didn't ask him why a sign needed to say what the man already was.

She laid her red and her green beside the old flash pinned to the back wall, the swallows and anchors and the rose that had hung there since her grandfather's day. Every sailor in the port had been inked from a sheet like that, bold black outlines filled with whatever colour the shop could afford that month. The best of them looked hurried, and they were not.

When the sign was dry she carried it to the door herself. Okonedo held it up to the lamplight, read the letters twice, and nodded. 'Mr,' he said, as if testing the weight of the word. Then he tucked the stick under his arm and walked off into the rain, and Nell wiped her brushes and thought how much a single syllable could carry once it was painted well.