Realism tattoo of fanned banknotes with a large 100 in an ornate circle on the forearm, shaded in black and grey.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fanned banknotes with 100 on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm tattoo shows several banknotes fanned out diagonally, with the top note's ornate border and engraved detail rendered in shading. A large raised-looking 100 sits inside a circular ornate frame at the lower end of the design. The work is mostly black and grey with soft highlights and muted brown tones, and the design fills the forearm from elbow towards wrist.

Realism Forearm Banknote Money Ornate frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Walworth Road ever paid Mr Ferris in coins. He liked his money flat and fanned, held the way a card sharp holds a hand he has no intention of showing, and he would walk each bundle across the counter with one thumb, pausing on every note as if it had said something rude. He taught me to count that way the summer I was sixteen, when the back room smelt of hot dust and Brylcreem and the radio was always on the cricket.

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The trouble started on a wet Thursday. A man in a grey mac slid a thick wad across to be changed into tens, and Ferris fanned it out under the lamp, ran his thumb along the edges, then stopped at the last note. It was the big one, with the scrolled border and the fine engraving that looked, under that bulb, almost like weather. He held it up for a long time. 'That's not for changing,' he said, and put it in the drawer under the till, beside the photograph of his late wife in her nurse's cap.

The man in the mac wanted his hundred back. Ferris only shrugged and told him to come on Monday, which was when the man stopped coming altogether. I asked about it once. Ferris just tapped the drawer and said the note had a pinprick in the corner, a tiny hole where a pin had once held it to a board, and anyone who kept money that long deserved to lose a bit of it.

When he died, the shop went to his nephew, who sold the till for scrap. I found the drawer in the skip behind the bakery, empty except for the photograph. I still fan my own notes when I count them, one thumb, slow. Nobody has ever asked me why.