Black and grey script lettering reading Est. 1986 on the outer upper arm.

Est. 1986 lettering on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells out Est. followed by 1986 in two lines of large script-style lettering, with a small flourish beside the full stop. The lettering uses bold black strokes with grey shading along the edges to create depth. The design is shown in close focus against a plain skin background with a dark blurred backdrop.

Lettering Upper arm Date Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, the queue won't move until the lorries have been searched, and in forty years I have never once seen a lorry searched quickly. So. You want the sign-painter's story? My cousin Tomas painted every shopfront in Kellerau for twenty years, gold leaf on the glass, black on the boards. In the spring of 1986 the bakery across the river asked him for a sign, and he gave them Est. with a little curl after the stop, like a swallow settling on a wire, and under it the year in tall leaning figures, the six fat at the bottom like a loaf proving.

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That winter the frontier closed. The bakery stayed on the far side of the water and the baker's wife stayed on this side, with the key to the ovens in her apron pocket and nothing else of her husband's. Every Sunday Tomas walked to the bridge with a loaf in a cloth bag and a pencil behind his ear. The guard on duty had sat two desks from him at school, and he let the bread through and kept the paint, because a sign is a sign and a loaf is only a loaf. Tomas could not cross, so he stood on the bank and pointed at the lettering he had painted, and the wife, who could read it from her side, shouted back the numbers as if they were a price she disagreed with.

When the gate finally lifted, eleven years later, the first thing she did was walk to the bakery with her hand out. Tomas said she did not go in. She put one finger on the six, which had flaked a little in the frost, and left a smear of flour on the black paint. He painted it over that same week, and the flour is still in there under the varnish, if you know where to look. Right, the lorries are moving. Mind the step.