Black lettering tattoo reading CRAFT on the back of a hand, with the A replaced by an anarchy symbol.

CRAFT lettering with anarchy symbol on hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells the word CRAFT in bold black capitals with a hand-drawn look. The A is replaced by a circled anarchy symbol, and the letters are slightly uneven, which suggests freehand linework. The photograph is taken at close range on a phone, with the hand curled across the frame against a dark fabric background.

Lettering Hand Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the urn, love, because the 7.40 is always late and this one takes some telling. There was a man called Hollis Penrose who kept the signal box at Ashdown Junction for thirty-one years, and all he ever wanted was to be left alone with his tools. He was no good at talking to the inspectors. He could mend a point lever with a bent nail and a bit of fishing line, though, and that was the craft of him.

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Then the new man came down from the city with a clipboard and a plan to close the box and run every train from a room in Derby. Hollis said nothing at the meeting. That night he took a tin of black enamel and a brush no bigger than a matchstick, and he went along the platform painting letters on the underside of the canopy where nobody looked. C, R, A, F, T. The A he would not write as an A. He drew a circle round a sharp star with a flick at the top, the way the lads in the goods yard had scratched it into everything.

Nobody noticed for a month. Then a woman waiting for a connection photographed the word over her shoulder and asked the stationmaster who had painted it. He told her it was the signalman. She laughed and said it was the best thing she had seen on a railway in years, and she was right, because the new man sat under it every morning waiting for his train, and by the spring he had started leaving the box alone.

Hollis never went back up the steps. The black letters are still there under the canopy, a bit uneven, the star slightly off true, and when the lamps come on in the evening you can read it from the bridge.