Black ink tattoo of the word CREATE in distressed brush-stroke lettering on the side of the body.

Distressed CREATE lettering in black ink

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tattoo spelling the word CREATE in bold, distressed capitals. Brush-like strokes and ink splatters cross the letters and extend past the word on both sides. The shading is solid black with small areas of bare skin showing through, set against a pale background of healthy skin.

Lettering Other Word Brush stroke Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The board over the door of Gull Street Print Works had been losing its letters since before Maud Carraway was born, so when the new owner rang to ask for it painted crisp, she took the job with a tin of black enamel and the flat brush she had carried since art college. Tobias, her apprentice, stood on the ladder holding the chalk line and asked whether they could just sand the old paint back to the wood.

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'Nobody sands a word like that,' she said. The original signwriter had lettered CREATE in heavy block capitals in 1961, and the damp off the harbour had eaten the edges until the letters bled into one another. She could have measured it and rebuilt every stroke. Instead she loaded the brush heavy and dragged a long diagonal stroke across the C and the R, the way a printer drags a squeegee, then flicked the bristles so the ink spat off in dots.

The owner, a young man with printer's ink under his nails, came out at lunch and frowned. 'It looks broken,' he said. 'It is broken,' Maud said. 'That's the point. You want people to stop and read it twice.' He didn't look convinced, and she didn't argue. She had painted enough shop fronts to know that clients rarely saw what they were paying for until the paint dried.

By dusk the enamel had set. The wind came round off the water and threw a fine spray across the board, and a few drops landed on the wet E and the wet A and stayed there, black on black. Tobias reached for a rag. Maud told him to leave them. When she climbed down, she looked up once at the word, scattered and still legible, and thought it looked exactly like something made by someone in a hurry who meant every mark.