Black and grey fine line tattoo of a hanging wooden sign reading Gone to market, placed on the top of a foot.

Gone to market sign on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A hand-drawn wooden sign hangs from two strings and reads Gone to market in black lettering. The linework is sketchy and uneven, with light grey shading along the edges and under the board to give it depth. The sign sits on the top of a bare foot against a dark glossy plastic backdrop, with the toes visible at the lower left.

Lettering Other Sign Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The board had hung from the cabin hook since Tuesday, two lengths of string knotted over a brass nail, and Tom Hallam had not once turned it round. Everyone on the Lark knew what it said. Gone to market. It was the sort of thing a bargee chalked up when he was off to Banbury with a hold full of coal and would be back before the locks froze, but Tom had written it in capitals the night before he went, and Mabel had watched him do it, and he had not come back.

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Folk on the towpath said the river kept what it wanted. Mabel said the river was only water and Tom had a weakness for the Plough at Hook Norton. She kept the cabin swept and the kettle on the hob, and each morning she nudged the sign a finger's width so the wind would not wear the paint off the letters.

On the ninth day a lad from the lock-keeper's cottage came along the bank carrying a parcel wrapped in oilcloth. Inside was Tom's pipe, its bowl cracked clean through, and a tin of tobacco gone to crumbs. The lad said it had come out of the weir at Shipton, wedged against a sluice gate, and that the keeper had kept it back for whoever came asking.

Mabel turned the pipe over in her palm for a long time. Then she took the sign down, carried it inside, and hung it above the stove, face out, so that anyone who stepped aboard would know exactly who was keeping the cabin now.