Realistic shaded tattoo of a baseball with blue Dodgers script across its centre, on a limb with a dark vignette around the edges.

Dodgers script on a baseball

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo showing a baseball with red stitching and tan, shaded leather, with the word Dodgers written across the middle in blue script with dark outlines. The shading on the ball gives it a rounded, three-dimensional look, while the lettering is flatter and more graphic. The image is framed tightly with a dark vignette that fades the edges.

Realism Other Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum taught me to stitch the way other girls learned to knit, with waxed thread and a hand that never looked at its own fingers. By fourteen I could work a hundred and eight double loops on a ball before the tea went cold. The leather came to us from the tannery up the valley, tan and faintly sour, and we cut it into the two figure-of-eight shapes that made a ball once you turned them inside out.

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The orders that summer were for the Harbour Lanterns, whose name was printed in blue script across the middle of every ball we sent south. Dad had cut the first lettering stencils himself, and he would not let anyone else trace the loop of the capital D. "Get the curl right or the whole thing looks like a dropped sock," he said, and tapped my wrist with a pencil.

In September a crate came back. One ball had split along a seam and the club's man wanted to know why. I turned it over under the bulb and found the stitching had gone wrong only in the places where Dad's hands had shaken, those last weeks before his chest gave out. I unpicked eleven loops, one at a time, and carried the ball home in my coat pocket.

I restitched it that night at our kitchen table with his thread, and the script came out clean across the middle, every swash exactly where he had meant it to be.