Black and grey line drawing flash of a pin-up woman with pigtails, sunglasses and a cigarette, with lettering across her chest.

Pin-up with lettering across the chest

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a pin-up woman with pigtails, sunglasses bearing the word EVERYTHING, and a cigarette between her lips. Her open jacket, dotted with polka dot shading, reveals lettering across her chest, with smaller tattoo-style motifs on her arms and a row of fish near the bottom of the image. The work uses bold, even linework with solid black areas and little grey shading, set on a plain white background.

Lettering Pin-up Woman Sunglasses Cigarette Lettering Jacket Fish Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide clerk at Wapping Lock had one rule, which was that nothing came up for free. Mira Dace logged every salvage weight on a cracked slate before noon: a tin of bearings, a length of copper pipe, a lamp that hummed when held near the ear. The jacket came up on a Tuesday, tangled in a cormorant net, black with white spots like rain on a windscreen. Nobody wanted it. Dov from the eel boats said it smelled of the river, and the river smelled of everything.

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She hung it on the hook by the kettle and meant to sell it at the barter market in Canning Town. Then the shoal came in on the afternoon ebb, a hundred tin fish no bigger than a palm, circling the lock gate as though they were reading the water. Old Sol from the pumping station said they only came when somebody in the district needed telling something. "Telling them what?" Mira asked. He shrugged. "Usually that they're late for something."

That evening she took the jacket down. Inside the collar, in faded marker, someone had written a single word, EVERYTHING, and the letters had been traced so many times by a careful hand that they stood out clean. She pulled the sleeves on. The lining was cold, then not cold. She walked to the gate with the lamp humming in her other hand and stood where the fish were turning.

"Everything," she said to the water, and felt foolish. The shoal stopped. Every tin fish turned its nose toward the light at once, then scattered into the dark like coins flicked from a palm. Sol, watching from the steps, said, "Wonderful," and Mira laughed, which surprised her, and wrote the day's weight on the slate: one jacket, one shoal, nothing at all for free.