Close-up of a mouth with gold grills over the lower teeth, showing black lettering that reads FLAWLESS on the skin below the lower lip.

FLAWLESS lettering below the lip

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of an open mouth with white upper teeth and gold grills over the lower teeth, held open by fingers with pink nails. The black lettering FLAWLESS is set in a bold, slightly slanted typeface on the skin below the lower lip. The ink is solid black with soft edges, and the image is evenly lit with warm skin tones.

Lettering Other Lettering Word Teeth Lip Mouth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo never let anyone sit on the bench stool until they had been told the price twice. Her workshop sat above a chip shop off Vyse Street in Birmingham, and its window held one brass sign she had cut herself, the letters slanted as if they were leaning into a stiff wind. Customers came in asking for gold in every shape. She had made a crown for a christening, a wedding band for a man who had dropped his in a canal, and a run of small gold plates for a drummer whose band never played outside Sparkbrook.

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Her nephew Tobi swept the filings each evening and kept a tally of the words people asked her to engrave. Most wanted names. A few wanted dates. One man wanted FLAWLESS in capitals and nothing else, and he would not say why. Mrs Okonedo charged him double, because the letters had to be cut by hand and each stroke had to lean the same way, and she did not like working on a word she had not chosen herself.

The drummer came back in March with a tin of old sovereigns and a wax impression wrapped in tissue. She spent an afternoon at the bench shaping the plates until they matched the mould, then polished them until they held the lamplight like warm butter. Tobi watched from the doorway, expecting her to say something about the word he had seen scratched on a scrap of card in the man's wallet.

She said only that the gold was fine and the fit was true, and that the best jobs were the ones nobody noticed until they were gone. Then she locked the bench drawer, and the chip shop smell came up the stairs the way it always did.