Black and grey lettering reading Don't be a, followed by a dashed empty square outline, with part of an ornate design visible at the bottom right.

Don't be a lettering with dashed square

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is lettering in a plain serif typeface reading "Don't be a", followed by an empty square drawn with a dashed outline. A partly visible ornamental design with scrolling leaf-like forms sits at the bottom right of the frame. The image is greyscale, with crisp black linework and no visible shading, and the text runs across the upper middle of the frame.

Lettering Text Ornament Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pruitt had the proof flat on the stone at half past six, the ink still tacky where my elbow had caught it. She read the line aloud with her reading glasses on the end of her nose. "Don't be a," she said, and tapped the empty box with her pencil. "Well, Tom? Be a what?"

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I told her I'd only set what was in the copy. The copy had come up from the Pier Theatre in a brown envelope, typed on a machine with a sticky e, and somebody had meant to paste a word into the gap and never did. The box had a small leafy scroll beneath it, the same border we used for funeral notices, so at least it looked official.

Mrs Pruitt said the Pier had been chasing their posters since the summer, and the last man who'd printed for them had gone off to Spain with the petty cash. She wanted it fixed before the van came. So I stood there with the composing stick, trying words in the gap. Don't be a stranger. Don't be a fool. Each one sounded like something shouted at a child on a pier, and none of them fitted the square, which was too small for anything but a single word and too wide for the one that kept arriving in my head, the one I didn't want on a poster in forty point.

So I set it blank. I locked the forme, inked the first sheet and pulled it through the press, and the dashed outline came up grey on the cream card like a stamp nobody had ever collected. Mrs Pruitt studied it for a long while. "They'll ring about that," she said. "Let them." Then she sent me home, and I walked past the bins with linseed still on my cuffs, thinking the empty box was the most honest thing I'd printed all year.