Black and grey photo of two open palms with the word HARD tattooed across the left fingers and WORK across the right, in block lettering on the hand.

HARD WORK lettering across the fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two open palms face the camera against a dark background, with the word HARD tattooed across the knuckles and fingers of the left hand and WORK across the right. The letters are bold, typewriter-style capitals with dark, solid ink and clean edges. The photograph is black and white, with strong contrast that centres attention on the lettering and the lines of the hands.

Lettering Hand Lettering Hand Finger Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The men of Greave Dene said the mountain only paid out to hands that had already given something to it. So when the tally clerk came up from the owners' office with his ledger and his pencil, Ada Pryce held out her palms before he could open his mouth.

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Her father had been killed in the low seam the winter before, and the wages had gone to the clerk's rent book. Ada had sat up a whole night at the kitchen table with a darning needle, a stub of soot and a pot of ink borrowed from the schoolmaster, pricking the letters into her skin one at a time. HARD ran across the knuckles of her left hand, and she bled through the first two letters and had to start again. WORK went across the right. By morning her fingers were swollen and purple, and the words stood out black on the wet skin.

Nobody could say afterwards whether the clerk read them or simply grew tired of looking at her. He squinted at the capitals, then at the coal dust on her cheeks, then at the boys behind her who had come up from the cage with their helmets under their arms. He wrote down the figure her father had earned. Then he crossed it out and wrote it again, larger.

The old women still tell it at the chapel teas. They say the ink never faded, and that the clerk kept that ledger in his desk until the day the owners shut the Dene, and that every figure in it was printed square and plain, the way a child prints when she means it.