Two black ink lettering tattoos, reading Harlem and Shake, sit on the lower legs just above the ankles.

Harlem and Shake words above the ankles

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two legs are shown from the shin down, each with a single word in black ink. The word on the left reads HARLEM in bold, angular capitals, and the word on the right reads SHAKE in a looser, handwritten style with a flourished S. The lines are solid and even, and the image is in black and grey with no colour ink, set against tie-dye sneakers and a dark background.

Lettering Ankle Word Sneaker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The laptop died halfway through the bassline, so Denise Hollins, hired to run the disco at her nephew's leaving do, stood on a plastic crate in the back room of the Ossett Liberal Club and shouted the only word the twelve-year-olds had taught her. "Harlem!" Nobody moved. Forty adults in novelty helmets and a Morris dancer's bells looked back at her with the patience of people who had paid for a buffet.

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Her nephew Kieran, nineteen and working very hard at looking unrelated to anyone, nudged the speaker cable with his trainer, tapped his phone against the amp and pressed play. The track came thudding back, tinny and bright, and for one second the room was a stopped clock. Then Mr Akroyd from the bowling team dropped to the carpet and shook his shoulders like a wet spaniel, and the whole hall came apart into it. Pensioners in bin bags. The vicar's wife with a traffic cone on her head. Somebody's gran doing something with a tea towel that should have been reported.

Denise didn't dance. She stood on her crate and thought about the summer she and her sister had practised the same nonsense at the end of Mill Lane, both of them in matching sneakers with the laces double-knotted, the four bars looping from a borrowed Walkman until the batteries gave out. Her sister had emigrated to Perth years ago. The letters had stopped in March.

When the track ended, Kieran climbed up beside her, out of breath and grinning. "Again?" he asked. She shook her head and handed him the microphone. Later, in the car park, she filmed ten seconds of the hall's lit windows and the wobbling silhouettes inside, and sent it to Perth with one line: still got it. She pressed send before she could think better of it, and the little ticks went grey, then blue, and then nothing at all, which was more than she had hoped for.