Black and grey tattoo on a lower leg showing three vintage butcher's cut diagrams of a sheep labelled Mutton, a calf labelled Veal and a pig labelled Pork, each with numbered cuts.

Mutton, veal and pork butcher's charts on a calf

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Three stacked vintage-style butcher's diagrams show a sheep, a calf and a pig, each labelled in script with its meat name and marked with numbered cuts. The linework is fine and shaded, with soft grey tones giving the animals a worn, engraved look. The image is shown against a plain black background, with the three panels running down the leg.

Other Calf Pig Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The three charts had hung above the chopping block at Hollis and Daughter since before the war: sheep, calf and pig in faded brown ink, each ruled with numbered cuts like a map of a country nobody had visited. Ruth had read them every morning for two years without once thinking to check them. On the Tuesday the cold room held nothing but a single lamb, so she took the pencil from behind her ear and decided to.

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She laid the carcass across the steel and began at the shoulder, where the chart said cut one, and found the neck. Cut two was a rib joint on paper and a flank in the meat. By half five the lamb had given up its secrets, and she had a column of pencil ticks along the edge of a delivery docket and a sinking certainty that old Mr Hollis's father had copied the diagrams from a catalogue and never once looked at the animal.

Mr Hollis came down in his slippers, hair flat on one side, and stood in the doorway reading the docket over her shoulder. He did not tell her she was wrong. He asked which cut the customers always wanted, and she said the shoulder, and he said then the shoulder was the only one that mattered on a Saturday, and the rest could be argued about by people with more time.

After he had gone to light the oven, Ruth stood in front of the mutton chart with the pencil in her hand. The number one on the sheep's haunch insisted it was a leg. She let it stand, and wrote the true name beneath it in small letters, where only someone holding a knife would ever think to look.