Two knees in black ripped jeans, with fine line lettering reading NO GODS on the left knee and NO MASTERS on the right, in thin greyish-purple ink.

No Gods and No Masters lettering on knees

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two knees are shown side by side below ripped black jeans. The left knee reads NO GODS and the right reads NO MASTERS, both in thin, even, single-line block capitals in a faded greyish-purple ink. The skin is lightly lit against a pale floor, and the text is centred on each knee.

Lettering Other Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the oven, the dough has no patience and neither, I'm told, did Nell Carrow. You want the story of the chalk on the back door, and I'll give it you before the first cart comes.

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Nell and Ada worked the night shift at Dunmore's bakery in Gravesend, where the tin roof rattled every time the early train went over. The foreman had a rule about the back door: nothing written on it. Nell did not believe in rules made by men who slept until nine. So one wet morning she chalked two lines on the jambs in thin, careful capitals, the sort a schoolmistress uses. NO GODS on the left, NO MASTERS on the right. The carters read them while they waited for their sacks, and by six every one of them was grinning.

The foreman came down with a bucket and a scrubbing brush. Ada stood in the doorway with flour to her elbows. "Scrub it," she said, "and you'll be scrubbing my bread."

He didn't. He never did. Instead he went to the parish and came back with a letter, and the letter said the shop would close by Michaelmas unless the chalk was gone. So Nell did the only thing a baker can do with a grievance. At four the next morning she pressed the words into the loaves themselves, using a stamp cut from a potato, and when the sun came up the whole town was carrying NO MASTERS home under its arm. Nobody ever found out who had cut the stamp. The shop stayed open until the war took the men, and the back door still shows faint chalk if you stand where the light falls thin.