Black serif lettering spelling LADYLIKE, one letter per finger across both hands, in a lettering style with pink nail polish visible.

LADYLIKE lettered across fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are shown with the word LADYLIKE tattooed in single letters across the fingers, with the L, A, D and Y on the left hand and the L, I, K and E on the right. The letters are solid black with shaded, serif-like strokes and no colour ink. The photograph is taken straight on against a pale grey ground, with pink nail polish and a silver ring visible.

Lettering Hand Letter Word Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has found the gap in the canopy again by the time you reach Fenn's stall at the bottom of Carrow Market, and it runs in a bright seam off the edge onto the board where the signs hang. You shake the water from your coat and wait while Ada Fenn finishes lettering a pub name in gold leaf, her tongue caught between her teeth, not looking up until the last serif is done.

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She keeps a biscuit tin of single letters cut from her late father's brass type, each one worn smooth at the feet. She tips them onto the counter and they chime against the wood. 'Word?' she asks. You tell her, and she laughs once, not unkindly, because she has heard every version of this errand from people who have stood where you are standing. The letters were never meant to be read in a row, she says. A sign-writer's trick is to break a word into pieces so the eye has to work to join them, and she has seen people carry whole sentences that way for forty years and still get them wrong.

You do not explain. You pick out the L and the A and the D, then the Y, which has a long tail like a fishhook. Ada sets them on a square of grey card and tilts it toward the light under the awning. The rain drums harder. She says the Y is always the hardest to make look like it belongs with the others, and you say it has never fitted anywhere, and she nods as though that is a complete answer.

When the card is full, she holds it up for a moment, then turns it to face you. The letters are dark and slightly ragged at the serifs, the way print looks when it has been pressed too hard. Across the aisle a man drags a shutter down over the fishmonger's and the water pours off it in a sheet. You pay her with coins warm from your pocket and carry the card out into the wet, holding it flat against your chest, as if the word might run before you reach the car park.