Close-up of a lettering tattoo on the side of the body reading MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE with a red arrow pointing left, in black and red ink.

Must be this tall to ride slogan with red arrow

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two lines of bold, block black lettering reading MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE, with a solid red arrow pointing left between the lines. The letters have crisp, even edges and the arrow is filled with flat red ink with slight shading. The text is centred on a pale skin background, with the photo framed close on the tattoo.

Lettering Other Arrow Slogan Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign came down off the Dragon Coaster the winter the council bought Marlow Pier, and I took it home in the back of the van because nobody else wanted a board that said what it said. Red arrow, black letters, the paint gone chalky where the sea had got at it. Dad painted the arrow himself in 1968 and always claimed it pointed the way the money went. Left, toward the car park and the exit, which he thought was a fine joke for a ride man to make.

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Every summer for thirty-one years I stood beside that sign with a wooden height pole in one hand and a clipboard in the other, and I learned that the line is never where the child thinks it is. Children rise onto their toes. Fathers crouch behind them. Once a grandmother tried to lift a boy by his collar, and I had to tell her the arrow was not a suggestion.

The girl who came in the last week of that August had sand on her shins and a brother who was already through the turnstile, shouting back at her. She set her heels flat against the pole and kept her chin level, the way a person does when they have practised in a bathroom mirror. The pole said 1.20. She was a finger's width short of it, and we both knew it. She didn't cry. She asked me what happened if you were not tall enough, and I told her the truth, which was that you went home and waited for the sea to do its work on you.

I let her through the gate anyway, and I told her the arrow had been pointing the wrong way since 1968.