Black block lettering reading MADE IN ENGLAND on a forearm, with a small dark design above it.

Made in England lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a pale forearm held in someone's hands, with the words MADE IN ENGLAND in bold black capital letters running along the skin. A small, partly visible dark design sits above the lettering at the edge of the frame. The image is in black ink only, with a plain background of green fabric and a watch on the wrist of the person holding the arm.

Lettering Forearm Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dora had cut the die for the word ENGLAND herself, on a Thursday, because the foreman's hand had started to shake and the Board of Trade man was coming on Monday with his clipboard. Forty gross of willow handles sat on the racks at Pelham's works in Walsall, and every one needed the mark pressed clean into the grain before it went into its crate for Karachi and Buenos Aires.

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The trouble was the second E. Young Terry Oakes had filed it too deep on Tuesday, so every strike came out with a little bar of ink trailing off the arm like a flag nobody had asked for. Dora tried filing it back, then tried a thinner ink, then sat at the bench with a magnifier and a cup of stewed tea and studied the letters the way her mother studied a hem.

On Sunday night she realised the flaw was the only honest thing in the batch. Nobody in Karachi would ever check whether the E was square. They would only see that a person had made it by hand and had not been able to make it perfect. So she left the die alone and pressed the stamp on Monday morning with the inspector watching. He tapped the crate, read the words aloud, and signed without looking up.

That evening Terry asked whether she had meant to leave the E like that. She said she had meant to be finished. She oiled the press, wiped the die clean, and found one thread of ink still caught in the bar of the second E, so she left that there too.