Red handwritten lettering reading I must not tell lies on the back of a hand, in a lettering style with a small spiked mark before the text.

Handwritten quote on the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of the back of a hand showing the words I must not tell lies in loose, handwritten red lettering. A small spiked mark sits to the left of the first word. The red ink sits on pale skin against a white marble surface, with the lines appearing slightly soft and uneven.

Lettering Hand Quote Word Handwriting Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomasz had been given fifty lines for telling Mrs Ardoin that the hamster ate his homework, and by nine o'clock on Sunday he had reached nineteen. His red biro had run dry twice. The kitchen table was still sticky from tea, and the cardboard tube from the wrapping paper lay at his elbow, where he kept losing it under the bread bin.

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The trouble with lines, he had discovered, was that the words stopped meaning anything after the tenth. I must not tell lies. I must not tell lies. The letters loosened and wandered until they looked like something a stranger had scratched on a wall. He pressed harder, and a small spike of ink dropped from the nib into the margin. He drew a little bracket beside it so it would look deliberate.

His grandfather came in from the back step smelling of rain and cut grass and read the page over his shoulder without comment. "That's not your handwriting," he said. "That's your nerves." He took the pen, wrote one line beneath Tomasz's nineteenth, and slid the paper back across the oilcloth.

Tomasz read it twice. It said: The hamster is under the hedge by the bins, and I was the one who left the cage open. In the morning he carried the page into school, folded it small, and handed it to Mrs Ardoin before the register. She read it at her desk, took off her glasses, and said nothing for a long time. Then she tore the page in half and gave him a box of tissues for the hedge.