Black lettering tattoo on the inner forearm showing stylised initials MTW above the script quote Open your mind Before your mouth.

Initials and quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the stylised capitals MTW in bold, spiky black letterforms with flourishes, set above a two-line handwritten script reading Open your mind and Before your mouth. The linework is solid and the lettering is filled in black with no visible shading or colour. It sits centred on the forearm against plain skin, with the photo taken straight on and a grey fabric sleeve visible at the edge.

Lettering Forearm Initial Quote Script text Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Morwenna Tregarthen had heard the saying so often that she no longer heard it at all, which is why it startled her when her brother Dai said it back to her across the pit-yard gate. Their father had painted it on a board above the back door of the Miners' Welfare kitchen the year the cages were rebuilt, the letters ornate and black, MTW for Mary Tangye Waddle, the widow who had fed three shifts of men on broth for nothing. Under her initials he had put the words he claimed were his own invention.

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Dai was twenty and had come to the gate with a bruise coming up under one eye and a story about a foreman. Morwenna did not ask about the eye. She handed him the tin of tea and the heel of yesterday's loaf and said nothing, which had been her mother's way and was not, she was beginning to think, the best one. Open your mind, Dai muttered, before your mouth. He was laughing at himself and wincing as he did it.

She thought about the old woman who had given the kitchen its name, who had kept her own counsel for forty years and had never once been seen to lose her temper. Morwenna had asked her once how she managed it. Mary Waddle had only tapped the board with a floury finger and said the lettering was the easy part.

Morwenna went back inside and lifted the board from its nails. Behind it, on the plaster, someone had pencilled a row of tally marks, one for every man who had walked out of the kitchen without a word of thanks and come back the next morning anyway. She counted them twice, left the board face down on the table, and let the kettle boil over.