Black and white photo of both forearms covered in lettering and collage-style tattoos, including outlined MY LIFE text, a skull, and a rose on the hand.

Forearm lettering and sticker-style collage tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Black and white photograph of a person's forearms, palms up, covered in tattoos. Bold outlined block lettering reading MY LIFE sits on the upper forearms, surrounded by collage-style printed labels, a skull, and smaller text elements. Fine linework dragon or vine motifs and a rose appear on the left forearm and hand.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glue was Bostik and it smelled of pear drops, which was why Tamsin kept the tube in her coat pocket even after the stationer on Cable Street shut for good. By the third issue the pages had stopped pretending to be neat. Her mum's Singer was for hems, not paper, so everything went down on the lino of the back bedroom: a steak knife for trimming, a Stanley blade for the letters, and a biscuit tin full of cuttings from supplements nobody else wanted.

Keep reading

The headline was the argument. Kieran from the print shop said nobody bought a zine that opened with a question, so she drew MY LIFE freehand in capitals, because the stencil set had lost its L years ago and she was not going to buy another. He said it looked like a bus timetable. She said that was the point, that a bus timetable was the only thing she'd ever been sure of getting right. They printed two hundred copies on a machine that jammed every eleventh sheet, and she counted the jams like rosary beads.

The last label she placed was a line she had cut from a council letter about bin collections: one bin, shared, Thursdays. She stuck it beside a grinning skull and a free X that had come from a rave flyer, and did not explain it to anyone. Years later, clearing that bedroom for a landlord, she found the biscuit tin under the radiator. The glue had gone to amber, and the spare labels had fused into one brittle sheet she could not separate without tearing. She folded it along the crease and put it in her bag, where it still is.

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