Close photo of black block lettering reading MADE IN ENGLAND on pale skin, with a dark feathery design beside it, held by two hands.

Made in England lettering on a limb

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two hands holding a pale limb, with the words MADE IN ENGLAND tattooed in black sans-serif capitals across the skin. A dark, fine-lined design sits at the left edge near the fingers, partly out of focus. The image is in black ink on skin with a warm, slightly dim light and a green fabric below.

Lettering Other Text Lettering

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the only one left on Harrow Skerry who can still set type on the old label press, so when the Leeds buyer's order arrives on the Tuesday ferry, the decision falls to you. Forty grey jumpers sit in crates on the quay, knitted by women whose names you know and whose grandmothers taught them the cable stitch. The buyer wants a phrase printed on each neck tag in plain black capitals, the kind that looks like a railway timetable.

Keep reading

Your brother Iain says the words are a lie, since the wool was carded in Shetland and the yarn came over the water from Norway. He is right, and you tell him so, then fetch the box of letters from the drawer under the window. The L is chipped at one corner. The Y has lost a little ink on its left arm. You set the line by hand, letter after letter, and ink the plate until the black sits deep enough to hold.

The press thunders for an hour. When the last tag comes off the bed you hold one to the lamp and see the words are straight, the spacing even, nothing you could be ashamed of. Then you think of the women counting stitches by candlelight, and you wonder whether a truth can be struck by a machine at all. You fold the tag into the lining of the first jumper and lay it on top of the crate.

On Thursday the boat leaves with the crates. Iain watches from the pier with his hands in his pockets, and you do not tell him what you did, because the tag is for the buyer and the wool is from here, and that has to count for something. Somewhere past the headland the jumper goes into a shop window in a city you have never seen, and the stiff little label sits against the back of someone's neck, saying what it was told to say.