Small black lettering reading 'Don't fool yourself' across the upper back of a woman with short hair in a grey tank top, on a city street.

Don't fool yourself lettering on the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with short hair is photographed from behind on a city pavement, wearing a grey lace-trimmed tank top, a black skirt and carrying a white tote bag. The tattoo is a single line of small black capital letters reading DON'T FOOL YOURSELF, set horizontally across the upper back. The lettering is crisp and evenly spaced, and the photo is taken in daylight with a shallow city background.

Lettering Back Quote Phrase Text Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Harcourt Blythe had painted shop fascias in Walthamstow for thirty-one years, and he could tell most things about a man from the way he stood at the counter. The fellow who came in one wet Tuesday in March stood very straight, with a sheet of brown paper under his arm. He unrolled it on my bench. Three lines in black capitals, drawn by hand, every letter leaning like a fence in a gale. DON'T FOOL YOURSELF, it read. He wanted it in gold leaf on the inside of his pawnshop window, where the light would catch it from the street.

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I told him I could make the letters sit straight, which was true, and that I could not make them look any less like a warning, which was also true. He did not seem to mind. He wanted the card for his wife, he said, who read the ledgers at the back of the shop and said nothing when the numbers ran red. I ruled the guidelines in chalk, two fingers apart, and laid out each letter with a hard pencil until the gaps looked the same to my eye. That took the whole afternoon. Anyone can form a letter. The trade lives in the space between them, and that space shows whether you were honest with it.

He paid in coins, counted out on the bench, and carried the card away as carefully as he had brought it. Three weeks later he was back for a second, smaller card, to hang on the wall behind the till where he would see it while he sat down. I asked whether it should say the same thing. He looked at the first card in his hands for a long moment. "Yes," he said. "The shop fooled me once. It won't do it twice."

I charged him by the letter, as always. I did not charge him for the gap, because a man who has learnt to see a gap has paid for it already.