Black tattoo of a cross with bold block lettering on the upper arm, shown in a bathroom photo.

Cross and block lettering on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tattoo of a cross is set across the outer upper arm, with block capital lettering running along both arms of the cross. The lines are solid and heavy with flat black fill and no visible shading. The photo is taken indoors against a white door and a bathroom backdrop, with the arm filling the right side of the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Cross Lettering Hope Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the oven's moods before you learn anyone's name on Ferriby Lane. At ten to four the flour bins are still cold and the back door sticks, so you lean your shoulder into it the way Dolly Ashcombe taught you, because she said the door only opens for people who mean it. Nobody else is awake on the lane except the milk float and a fox sorting through the bins.

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The starter had gone sluggish over the weekend. You fed it twice, then a third time, and wrote the times on the masking tape across the jar: 4.10, 9.40, 2.15. Dolly never wrote anything down. She pressed the dough with two fingers and simply knew. You press it now and it springs back slower than you'd like, so you cover it with a damp cloth and go to scald the milk instead.

By five the windows fog. You shape the loaves in silence, the bench floured white, and you find yourself counting the rounds under your breath the way she did, one for the bread, one for the customer who never comes. The last tray goes in as the sky over the tannery turns the colour of weak tea. On the sill, in the chalk she used for orders, the word HOPE is still there, underlined twice, scrawled for the first customers after the winter the mill closed.

At six the shutter goes up. The first customer is a boy in a school jumper asking for a bun he can't afford, and you hand it over anyway, wrapped in paper stamped with the cross Dolly cut from an old biscuit tin. He looks at the cross, then at you, and says it's his nan's favourite shape. You wipe your hands on the apron and tell him to give her the bun on the house.