Thin black handwritten lettering reading kill the king across the inner wrist of a palm-up forearm, in a fine line lettering style.

Kill the king script on inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a palm-up wrist showing the words kill the king written in thin, handwritten black script. The lines are even and fine, with the letters sitting in a slightly uneven baseline, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The skin is light and the tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a dark couch and a green fabric at the top.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Text Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the lamp, because this is the part where the cobbles get slippery. Forty winters back there was a chess hall above a tallow chandler's in Gravesend Lane, and the men who played there after dark were the sort who would sell their boots and then beat you for the laces. The old marker, Ezra Mollin, kept the score on a slate and never once lost a game he cared about.

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One November a boy of about eleven came up the stairs with a folded note and a penny, asking for Mollin by name. Nobody had told him Mollin had gone blind the spring before. So the boy read the note aloud himself, slowly, in a voice that wobbled on the long words. It was from a girl called Tamsin Ferris, who worked the mangle at the laundry and played a fierce bishop's game by the window. Her note said only three words, pressed so hard the pencil had torn the paper: kill the king.

Mollin laughed until he coughed. "She means the position, lad. Her king's cornered with two rooks circling. She wants me to tell her where to put the knight." But the boy shook his head. He had watched her through the glass that afternoon, and he had seen her face when she thought nobody was looking, and it was not the face of someone asking for advice.

Mollin went to the board and moved the knight himself, feeling his way across the squares by memory, and the whole room went quiet as the pieces clicked. Tamsin won that night and every night after, until the laundry closed. Mollin never said why he helped her. He only swept his own king off the board when the game was done and dropped it into the coal scuttle, where the boy found it the next morning, still warm from the grate.