Black ink tattoo of a pig marked with numbered butcher's cut lines in a vintage engraving style, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pig butcher's cut diagram on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pig in side profile is outlined in black ink, with dashed lines dividing the body into numbered cuts from 1 to 6, as on a traditional butcher's chart. The linework is fine and even, with light hatching and stippled shading along the belly and legs, and the numerals are set in an old-fashioned hand. The design is in black ink only on pale skin and sits across the forearm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on Cardigan Street since five, and by seven the awning over Ada Pryce's stall sagged like a wet sail. I kept my hands in my apron and watched the chalkboard run. Everyone in Hackney knew the chart Ada pinned above the block: the old pig drawn in side profile, dashed lines cutting it into numbers, a shop-print she'd bought off a dead man's widow in Lewes. Customers asked for number three the way other people asked for the time.

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That Thursday a boy came in soaked to the knees, his sleeve pushed up, and he laid his forearm on the marble like it was evidence. Somebody had inked the same pig on him, the same fine black lines, the stippled belly, the numerals in that careful schoolroom hand. He wanted to know which cut was which. Ada didn't answer him. She took the cleaver from its hook, turned it once in the lamplight, and tapped the blade against the number one on his skin.

"Shoulder's the honest part," she said. "Everything else is somebody's opinion."

He paid in coins he had to count twice, and went off into the rain with the pig still on his arm. Ada wiped the marble and pinned a fresh sheet over the old chart. Number three was gone from the board by closing, and nobody thought to ask who had bought it.

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