Two photographs of small outline plaster tattoos, one reading YOU CAN DO IT on the back of a hand and one reading FEEL BETTER on the inner wrist, with flat plaster designs above.

Plaster tattoos with encouraging words

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The collage has four panels: two flat illustrations of plasters with handwritten phrases, and two photographs of black line plaster tattoos on skin. The tattoos use clean black outlines, dotted edges and simple hand-lettered text, with little or no shading. The bottom-left photo shows the tattoo on a hand against a blue background, and the bottom-right shows it on a wrist against a red background.

Lettering Fine line Hand Forearm Text Breathe

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud kept the first-aid tin behind the cloakroom hatch, between the spare tickets and a bottle of iodine nobody had opened since the Coronation. Her mother had written the words on the plasters in pencil, back when the Marine Pavilion ballroom still had a band on Saturdays: CALM, ENOUGH, YOU CAN DO IT, BREATHE. Most had gone to skinned knees and split heels. Three were left, the pencil gone grey.

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It was half past ten when a lad came through the side door clutching his palm, a sliver of glass from a dropped lemonade bottle winking in the gutter light behind him. He wanted to ask the girl in green by the piano for a dance, he said, but his hands were shaking and he'd only make a hash of it. Maud sat him on the upturned crate, cleaned the cut under the bulb, and reached for the tin.

She passed him the last one marked BREATHE. He studied it for a long moment, then pressed it flat across his palm with his thumb, the way you would smooth a letter before posting it.

When he went back in, the band had struck up a slow number. Maud watched through the crack in the door as he crossed the sprung floor. The girl in green looked up, laughed, and they moved off together under the glitter ball. The tin lid rattled shut in Maud's hands. Two plasters left, and she thought she might keep them.