Small black capital letters spelling LOVE, tattooed vertically along the inner rim of an ear in a lettering style.

LOVE lettering on the inner ear

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of an ear with the word LOVE tattooed vertically in small, plain black capital letters along the inner rim. The letters use clean, even, solid black linework with a simple sans-serif form. The soft natural light and shallow focus keep the tattoo as the clear subject, with dark hair visible at the left edge.

Lettering Other Love Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass ferrule on my sable brush had gone green again, so I was scraping it with a thumbnail when Dennis Pask came into the workshop holding his cap in both hands. He wanted a word painted, he said, and he wanted it small and plain. Not a name. Not a boat. Just LOVE, he said, as if I might argue with him about it.

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I asked where it was going. He said the mooring post at the end of the slipway, the grey one with the rusted cleat, facing the harbour wall. Vertical, he said. Joan always read things from the top down when she was tired, and she'd be looking across from the chair in the front window on Victoria Road. I knew then he didn't mean the post at all. I had lettered the Mary Ann's name in the same stacked capitals thirty years before, with Joan standing at my shoulder holding a mug of tea, telling me to keep the strokes even and the spacing honest.

It took me two mornings. I chalked a faint line down the post with a plumb bob, then laid each letter in with black enamel, one stroke at a time, the L first and the E last, while gulls argued on the wall. The wind came off the water and tried to take the brush from my hand. Dennis held the tin steady and said nothing, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for me that month.

On the third morning the front-room curtain moved. I couldn't make out her face from the slipway, only the pale square of the window and a hand lifting, slowly, the way you'd wave a boat in. The paint on the post was still tacky. I didn't touch it again.