Black and white photo of two inner wrists, each with a small lettering tattoo, the word past on the left and future on the right, in a LALetter style on the wrist.

Past and future words on two wrists

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two inner wrists are shown side by side in a black and white photograph, with the word past tattooed on the left wrist and the word future on the right. The letters are set in a serif typeface with clean, solid black outlines and no shading. The arms fill most of the frame against a plain grey background, and the left forearm shows pale raised linear marks.

Lettering Forearm Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Haskell keeps the rubber stamps in a biscuit tin beside the cloakroom hatch, and on Saturdays he lets you do the honours because your hand is steadier than his. Tonight there are only two. One says PAST and the other says FUTURE, and the Ormsby Ballroom has never once used them on the same person. You press PAST to the inside of Dora's left wrist while she laughs at the ink smudging, then you hold out your own arm for the other.

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The band is playing a slow foxtrot nobody asked for, and the floor empties until only the two of you are left under the mirror ball, which has lost a third of its glass since the war. Dora says the first manager made the stamps as a joke when the hall opened in 1931, that you were meant to choose one at the door and keep to it. You tell her the ink has never faded, which is true, and that nobody has ever danced with a ticket.

Halfway through the second verse the mirror ball stops turning, and the lights come up grey on the faded stage. Dora wipes her wrist on her skirt, but the PAST stays exactly where it was, dark and square. Her hand goes to your sleeve and rests there, and you understand the joke at last: the stamps were never for leaving, only for proving you had arrived.

At six the milk float rattles past the window. You take her wrist and press the second stamp over the first, so the two words overlap and blur into one dark bar. Then you open the side door and let the morning in, cold and grey, and you do not look back at the empty floor.