Portrait and script signature on a limb

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey portrait of a man's face in three-quarter profile, shaded with soft gradients and sharp darker accents around the eyes and lips. Below it, a looping black script signature reads Elvis Presley, with a bold flourish under the name. The photograph is taken close up against a plain skin background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Lettering Other Portrait Face Man Script Name

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sleeve came back across the counter on a Tuesday, its corners gone soft from a summer of thumbs, and Ray Pruett slid it to Tommy Vane with the look he saved for bad news. "Forty quid for a signed copy," he said. "Tell me it's real."

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Tommy turned the card over under the strip light. The loop of the capital was too tight and the tail of the last letter dragged like a fishing line left in the water too long. He knew it, because he had drawn that tail himself on a Saturday in August, at the kitchen table in Broadstairs, with his mum's biro and a sheet of brown wrapping paper that kept sticking to his wrist. He had practised for six weeks until the hand stopped looking practised.

"Anyone can copy a name," Ray said, tapping the flourish with one bitten nail. "It's the underline that gives you away. Nobody hurries a flourish. It has to come out of the arm without asking the head." Outside, the buyer from Ramsgate was pacing in front of the window, favouring one leg, checking his watch against the church clock.

Tommy fetched a pen from the jar by the till. He wrote his own name on the back of a receipt, then let the pen run on past the end of it, down and round in a long lazy loop that went exactly where it wanted. Ray leaned in, read it, and said nothing for long enough that Tommy began to worry.

"Well," Ray said at last, taking the sleeve back and sliding it under the counter. "That one's yours, then."