Black and white photo of a hand with the word MONSTER in hand-drawn black lettering tattooed on the inner wrist.

Monster lettering on inner wrist

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a hand resting on a fluffy fur surface, with dark-painted fingernails visible. The word MONSTER is tattooed across the inner wrist in uneven, hand-drawn capital letters with a slightly irregular stroke. The image is monochrome, so the ink appears as black, and the composition centres the wrist in the lower half of the frame.

Lettering Hand Monster Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the Constance is finished, though not the way Mr Pask ordered it. He wanted her name in gold leaf across the transom, and I gave him that, but when I asked what he wanted under it on the bow board he went quiet, then said MONSTER, in capitals, and would not be talked out of it. Half the quay had stopped to watch me mark out the letters in chalk. My hand was steady enough on the gold, but the black paint kept running off the brush, so the stroke came out uneven, the M leaning like it had been drinking.

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Mrs Hosken came down from the chapel steps to tell me it was unlucky to paint a bad word on a boat, and that the sea would take offence. I told her the sea had never once needed a word from me to take offence. Pask only laughed until he coughed. His wife called him a monster every Sunday for forty years, he said, and he meant to keep the word where she could see it from the kitchen window every time the boat went out.

The Constance went out on Thursday with the glass falling. Nobody expected her back before dark, and when the fog came in off the point it was thick enough to lose the breakwater. I stood on the wall with Tom Hosken's lamp and could see nothing but grey. Then, out in the murk, the bow came round, and the black letters caught the lamplight, shaking and crooked and absolutely plain. The men aboard steered for them. I have never been so glad of my own bad handwriting.

Pask paid me in full this morning and asked for a second sign for the stern. I said I'd do it, but only if he tells me what the word means to them now. He says it's a joke, but I think he's wrong. Write soon, and tell me how the new shop sign turned out.

Love, Ada