Small black fine line script reading Mama with an outlined heart on the inner forearm near the wrist, with a clenched hand in the foreground.

Mama script and heart on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a clenched hand showing a small tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist. The tattoo is the word Mama in thin black script followed by an outlined heart. The shallow depth of field blurs the outdoor background, and the ink is black with no shading or colour.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Heart Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mam,

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The rain has got into the big top again, so Dad says the waltzers stay folded until Thursday. I've been sat on the generator box all morning with Ruby from the candy floss stall, watching the field turn to soup and the gulls fight over a dropped toffee apple. She says you'd have hated her hair for a week and then asked for her mint humbug recipe. She's wrong about the humbugs, but I didn't say so.

Yesterday at Ashford a tattooist called Alfie set up a folding chair beside the dodgems and asked what I wanted. I said something small, something that would still look right when I was old and the ink had softened. His machine hummed like a wasp in a jam jar. He did a heart with a loose tail that curled like a kite string, and beside it the word you always wrote on the back of my school jumper labels, the one you said was too soft for boys. He wiped it with a green cloth and told me to keep it out of the sun for a fortnight, so I've been wearing my cardigan sleeve down like a nun.

At supper Dad passed the peas and didn't ask to see it, but after the pudding he took my wrist in his grease-black hand and turned it to the lamp. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said the wheel would be at Dover by Saturday and the sea would be in the photographs, if I wanted to be in them too.

So come to the field on Sunday. The Ferris wheel stops at the top for a minute when the lad on the brake gets his tea, and from up there you can see the whole coast laid out like a tablecloth. Bring your reading glasses so you can check my spelling. Don't tell Nan I've gone soft.

Your Danny