Close view of the back of a neck with the black lettering open at the close tattooed in a serif script, with a raised scar running down below it.

Open at the close lettering on neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of the back of a person's neck showing the words open at the close in black lettering. The letters are in a thin, slightly italic serif style with even linework and solid black ink. A raised scar runs vertically below the tattoo, and loose hair falls across the upper part of the frame.

Lettering Neck Text Lettering Scar Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, settle down, you lot, and mind the stove. Nell Garrow kept a bookstall at the bottom of Canning Close, where the lane gave onto the towpath, and every night she left her shutter propped and a lamp burning in the window. Her husband had taken coal up the cut one spring and never come back down it. The bargemen knew her light. They'd call out, open at the close, Nell, and she'd pass them a loaf or an almanac for the price of a song.

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Then a lad called Tobias Fenn started coming to her every Thursday with a pocket full of halfpennies and no notion how to read. She taught him anyway, using the spines of old chapbooks, sounding out each word with his finger under it. He asked her once why she never shut up shop at dusk like the others. She said a shut door is a question nobody wants to answer.

Winter came hard that year and the river froze to the bridge piers. On the last night of the month a figure came stumbling down the close, half blind with snow, and it was not her husband but Tobias's father, who had been dragged out of the ice at Brentford and carted home. He knocked at her shutter. She did not ask his business. She simply lifted the bar and set the kettle on.

The lamp burned in that window until the ice went out in March, and by then Tobias could read his own name in the stall's ledger, in a hand that wobbled like a wake behind a slow boat.