Black and red tattoo on the inner wrist and forearm of a masked head with black hair above the lettering 'I wiped the SMILE off Jokers face', in a bold black linework style.

Masked head and quote on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised head with black hair and a red domino mask sits above a three-line quote in black script lettering, all on the inner wrist and forearm. The outlines are solid black with flat black hair shapes and a flat red mask, and the lettering mixes italic, capitals and a handwritten script. The composition is centred on the forearm against a dark background, with the wrist at the top of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Mask Hair Quote Lettering Head Joker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The path through the beech wood runs so close to Harrow End that you can hear the bingo caller through the trees on a Thursday, and that was where the painted man set up his stall. He had a booth beside the old kissing gate, two red bulbs strung over the counter, and a board that read LAUGH OR PAY in letters that looked like they'd been drawn by a drunk fox. Mrs Thorne had already lost a fortnight's egg money to him, and the Parish Council had been too polite to do anything about it, so somebody had to.

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I went out with my uncle Ned's old red domino mask, the one he wore for the Boxing Day mummers, and a jam jar of turpentine wrapped in a rag. The grin on the board was the only thing about the booth that looked finished. It stretched from one side of the sign to the other, and the eyes above it had been painted so that they followed you along the path.

"You're too late, love," said the man behind the counter. He hadn't turned round. He simply knew I was there, the way a fox knows about a henhouse. "Smile's already off. Everybody who comes this way leaves a bit of it behind."

I pressed the rag to the board and rubbed until my arm ached. The paint came away in long red-tinted streaks, and beneath it there was only raw wood and a line of pencil that read, in my own handwriting, *Wipe it off yourself first*. Behind the mask my mouth had begun to twitch. I was grinning, and I couldn't stop. When I looked down at my wrist the turpentine had left a bright red mark across the skin, and it looked exactly like the start of a joke I had not yet been told.