Black block lettering reading MY BODY MY ART on a person's lower abdomen, above the waistband of blue denim jeans.

My Body My Art lettering on the lower abdomen

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the words MY BODY MY ART set in two lines of uneven, hand-drawn block capitals across the lower abdomen. The strokes are solid black with soft grey edges, and the letters are slightly irregular in width and spacing. The tattoo sits just above the open waistband of blue jeans, with the wearer's hands holding the denim and a white top visible at the upper edge of the frame.

Lettering Other Text Slogan Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the brush clamped in your teeth when the skipper comes down the quay with the stencil he swore he'd lost. The hull of the Margaret Ann is grey primer under your boots, and the name on the stencil belonged to a boat that went down off Scarrow in the winter of seventy-nine. He wants her lettered by Friday. You tell him the card has gone soft with damp and the edges will bleed. He tells you nobody reads a boat's name closer than the gulls do.

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So you do it freehand. You rest your wrist on the rail and let the letters come out the way your hand wants them, a little uneven, the M leaning like a man walking into wind. Gulls wheel over the harbour wall. Two lads from the Hennessy boat come to watch and rib you about it, and you don't look up. The enamel is cheap black from the chandler's on Pier Street, and it goes on thick and drags, thinning to grey at the edges where the brush runs dry.

When the skipper climbs the ladder to inspect, he runs his thumb along the C and says it looks like a child's work. You say a stencil was made by a machine that never had to get up at four in the morning. He doesn't answer. He stands on the quay for a long minute with his hands in his oilskin pockets, then goes to the wheelhouse and turns the radio on.

At dawn the Margaret Ann goes out past the breakwater with her name sitting crooked on her bow. Your flask is cold and the light is coming up grey over the water. Later, Agnes from the chandler's tells you the skipper's wife stood at the kitchen window and said that from the water, you could read it perfectly well.