Two hands with traditional style tattoos, bold black lettering across the finger knuckles and coloured banner designs on the backs of the hands.

Knuckle lettering and banners on both hands

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

Both hands are shown against a dark background, with bold lettering tattooed across the finger knuckles and a coloured banner design on the back of each hand. The outlines are heavy and dark, with flat fills in red, yellow, green and black. The close framing keeps the knuckle lettering and banners central, with the fingers angled towards the viewer.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had painted the same four letters on the Ferris Street chippy for eleven years, and every spring the damp lifted them off the board like a bad tooth. Tonight she stood on the pavement at half past eleven with a tin of black enamel and a size two brush, waiting for the drizzle to ease so the gloss would take.

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Across the road, the pawnbroker's sign flickered between its O and its W. Her father had hung that board in 1962, red script on a cream shield, and he swore the paint would outlast the building. Nell had her doubts about the building. She had stopped doubting the paint the night she found his tins under the workbench, each labelled in neat capitals: RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLACK, and a fifth tin marked only with a row of tiny crosses.

She climbed the stepladder and began on the first letter. The brush went where her hand remembered, heavy outlines first, then the fill, the way he had taught her on Sunday afternoons with a jar of cold tea at her elbow. A bus sighed past. Somebody in the flat above was singing badly to a radio, and the chippy's fryer hissed through its open door.

When she finished the last letter, the sign looked newer than the street around it, which was the point. She climbed down, wiped her fingers on her overalls and read it through the drizzle. The fifth tin could wait. It would keep, the way tins do.

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