Black sans-serif lettering reading Made by Mattel with a trademark symbol, tattooed vertically along the sole of a foot on a dark leather surface.

Made by Mattel lettering on the sole of a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bare foot, shown from the sole, with the words Made by Mattel and a TM symbol tattooed in a single vertical line along the arch. The lettering is a clean, plain sans-serif in dark ink with simple solid strokes and no shading. The foot fills most of the frame against a dark leather surface, with the toes visible at the bottom of the image.

Lettering Other Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Vane had spent nineteen years on the paint line at Pellow and Sons before anyone trusted her with the stamp. It was a small steel tongue that came down on the sole of each plastic foot, pressing in the words the firm was proud of: Made by Pellow and Sons, with a raised little mark the foreman insisted on calling the tuppence sign.

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The trouble started in March, when the Hollins Bay plant lost its contract with the seaside gift shops and the last crate of feet went to the skip unsold. Dorothy pocketed one before it went. Its stamp had come down a shade crooked, so the letters ran up the arch in a neat line, like a path someone had walked. She set it on her kitchen windowsill, where the harbour light came in grey at six each morning.

Her grandson Tomas, nine and furious about the move, found it there and asked why a doll's foot needed to say who had made it. Dorothy told him nobody made anything on their own, not even a doll. He pressed the sole against his palm and frowned at the letters, as if the words might rub off on him.

They walked the shingle at low tide the next Saturday. Tomas took a stick and copied the stamp into the wet sand, letter by letter, pressing hard at the TM until it held. The sea came in slow and patient, filling the grooves first, then the M and the P, until only the tuppence sign was left, bright as a coin, and then the water took that too.