Black and grey serif lettering across a forearm in two lines of text, with lace and skull-print fabric behind the arm.

Quote lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with two lines of black serif lettering tattooed across it, reading a quotation about the tongue and palate. The letters are crisp and evenly spaced, with solid black ink and a smooth, clean edge. The image is black and white, with lace and dark skull-print fabric softly blurred in the background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Lettering Lace Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hallam pressed two fingers to the boy's jaw and told him to stop chewing his words. "Lo-lee-ta," she said slowly, the way she had taught a hundred children in the back room above the chemist's on Corporation Street. "Count it out. The work is done by the tip of the tongue, not the lips. Lips are only the door."

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Danny Rourke, eleven and red to the ears, had been sent up from the Saturday class because the vicar had described his Easter recitation as a mumble with ambitions. He pushed his tongue behind his top teeth and tried again. The word came out whole for once, three neat stops like a man going down a cellar stair, and the boy looked so astonished at himself that Mrs Hallam had to turn to the window to hide her face.

The metronome on the piano lid ticked on, its brass arm swinging between the two pencil marks she kept for a hopeless case. She had bought it from a pawnshop in Preston the year her husband died, because he had always tapped time on the lid while he listened to her practise. Nobody had told her then that she would find herself doing the same thing, one finger rapping the wood, counting the steps down and up.

On the Thursday before Easter the boy stood up in the church hall in a borrowed blazer that reached his knuckles. He said the lines without a single stumble. When he reached the last word, he tapped the teeth gently with his tongue, exactly as he had been taught, and in the back row Mrs Hallam, who had come to see whether any of it had stuck, found she was keeping time with her own hand on her knee.