Small black handwritten tattoo reading PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT on a forearm, with an open hand resting on a white marble surface.

Handwritten quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm and open hand rest flat on a white marble surface, with the palm facing up and the fingers spread. Three lines of rough, hand-lettered capitals sit on the forearm, reading PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT, in dark grey-black ink with slightly soft edges. The image is evenly lit and shot straight on, with the text placed to the right of centre.

Lettering Forearm Quote Handwriting Text Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell never came in by the front door. She tapped twice on the back glass of my workshop, always after the bell over the shop had stopped, and she always wanted the same thing: a lock for a box she did not own yet. Brass, she said, with a keyhole no wider than a hair, and a hinge that would sulk if anyone pulled too hard.

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I made her four in eleven years. The first went on a tin of sherry drops she kept in the pantry. The second was for the drawer where her husband's racing papers lived, and the third for the gas cupboard after the scare with the kettle. She paid in coins she had counted twice, and she never once asked me to open anything. She only wanted to be sure the thing would hold.

The fifth came in the winter the harbour froze. She brought no box that time. She brought a sheet of paper with three lines pressed hard into it in pencil: PROTECT ME, FROM WHAT, I WANT. Under them, smaller, she had written 'for the wrist'. I understood she meant a clasp she could not undo herself, with the key kept somewhere else. I made it from a link of old ship's chain and filed the teeth by hand. When I gave it to her she turned it over once, then fastened it and handed me the key. 'Keep this in your till,' she said. 'If I come back asking for it, say no.'

She never came back. The key is still in my till, beneath the float, and every spring I think about changing the lock on the shop door, and every spring I don't.