Small black quotation marks tattooed on the inner wrist of a hand resting on teal denim, in a simple fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Quotation marks on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with its fingers curled, showing two small black quotation marks tattooed across the inner wrist. The marks are solid and simple with clean edges and no shading. The soft teal denim behind the hand gives a plain, muted background.

Forearm Punctuation Wrist Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clerk of the Leeds assize court wanted every word down exactly as spoken, so I took the witnesses' sentences in shorthand and set them out afterwards with the marks that tell a reader whose mouth the words came from. Mr Abel Fenwick had a habit of saying things twice, once plainly and once to the floorboards, and I had to decide which version got the marks.

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On the third morning he stood in the box with his cap crushed between his palms and said, 'I did not see the lamp lit.' Then he looked at me, not at the judge, and said, 'Put that down as I said it, miss.' I wrote it in pencil, the way I always did for the first draft, and watched the point waver over the margin.

That evening, at my lodging on Cardigan Road, I copied the transcript fair in ink. Every speech I had been given I set between its pair of little commas, six hooks in all for the day, and I noticed how easily the marks could make a man sound as though he were standing an arm's length away, speaking up for himself. The inked pairs looked like a careful row of stitches holding something in place.

The gas ledger turned up the following week, and it showed the lamp had been lit at six. Fenwick was recalled, and when he took the box again he did not look my way at all, which was fair enough. I still think of those marks when I sort my pencils: two small pairs holding a man's lie, and the one true thing he said, kept apart from the rest of the page.