Traditional style tattoo of red lips with bloodied teeth and dripping red, with the words SWEETNESS and I WAS ONLY JOKING, on the upper thigh.

Lips with bloody teeth and slogan on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo of stylised red lips with a open mouth showing teeth stained with red, with dripping red below the lower lip. The word SWEETNESS arcs above the design and I WAS ONLY JOKING sits in a curve beneath it, both in black capital lettering. Thick black outlines and flat red fills dominate, with black inside the mouth, on smooth skin with a plain background.

Traditional Lettering Thigh Lip Teeth Blood Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

I had been up since three, the proving tins sweating under their cloths and the big oven ticking as it warmed. Marcus came in through the yard door at ten past four, smelling of cigarettes and somebody else's perfume, with a smear of raspberry jam on one cuff he swore was from a customer. He had the grin that made the Saturday girls go pink at the counter. "Sweetness," he said, reaching past me for a cinnamon knot. I slapped his hand with a tea towel, and he laughed as if I'd done it on purpose.

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For eleven years he had called me that, and for eleven years I had believed the sugar in it. Then in March I found a second ledger tucked behind the flour sacks, columns of cash lifted from the shop account on nights he swore he was at his mother's in Keighley. I didn't shout. I laid the ledger on the steel bench beside the scales and waited for him to come in whistling. He stopped in the doorway and saw it, and his face did its quick, easy rearranging. "Ah," he said. "Sweetness. I was only joking."

Joking, I thought, was a word people reached for once the thing had already happened. So I went back to my dough. I folded in the butter, shaped the knots, and hummed under my breath while he stood there deciding what sort of morning this was going to be. At half five I opened the firebox of the old deck oven and fed the ledger in page by page, the way you would feed kindling, until the room smelled of burnt paper and cinnamon and you could no longer tell which was which.

By six the shutters were up and the first queue had formed in the cold. Marcus stood behind the counter in his clean apron, wrapping loaves for the Saturday girls and never once asking what had gone up the flue. Every customer said thank you, and he gave each of them the same warm grin, the one he had always saved for the people he was about to lie to.