Black lettering reading MADE IN ENGLAND on a forearm, with a partly visible black and grey lion head tattoo near the wrist.

Made in England lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm held by two hands, with the words MADE IN ENGLAND in bold black capital letters running across the skin. A partly visible black and grey design of an animal's head, which appears to be a lion, sits at the upper left edge of the frame near the wrist. The skin is pale and the image is lit softly, with a green fabric beneath the arm.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Lion

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harker had been stitching labels at Calder Mill since she was fifteen, and she could tell a finished coat from a half-made one by the way it hung on the hook. On the Friday before Whitsun the foreman carried down a fresh roll of cream cotton tabs, the words woven in black, and a brass stamp shaped like a crouching lion that old Mr Pym had kept in a biscuit tin since before the war.

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The order was from a coat house in London, forty dozen wool overcoats, and the buyers wanted the lion pressed beside the words, not beneath them. Nell said the lion belonged to the mill's own goods and had never once been wrong about a seam. The foreman said the buyers liked a beast to go with their country, so she sewed them, steadying each tab with her thumb until the needle caught and left a small bead of red on the cotton. She did not complain. She had learned that a little of yourself in the work was simply part of the making.

On the last night of the run she kept one tab back. Inside its folded edge she worked her mother's initials, E.H., in thread so pale that nobody reading the label would ever find it, then pressed the lion onto a coat already boxed for the early lorry. The coat went south in the dark, carrying the words that told everyone where it had been made.

Years later, a clerk in a shop off Regent Street turned up a collar to check the size and found a small lion, and under it two letters nobody could explain. He never asked. Nell heard about it from the foreman, who had heard it from the shop, and she sat down on the cutting table and laughed until her eyes ran. She liked to think that somewhere a coat was still hanging with her mother's letters under its collar, warm against someone's neck, the truth sitting on the outside where anyone could read it.