Lettering tattoo on the outer thigh reading a quote in black script, flanked by red and blue 3D glasses on the left and a red bow tie on the right.

Quote with 3D glasses and bow tie on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A black lettering quote runs across the outer thigh in three lines, set in a gothic-style serif typeface. A pair of 3D glasses with red and blue lenses sits to the left of the text, and a red bow tie sits to the right, with the words in black linework and the two small icons in colour. The photograph is taken straight on at close range, with the thigh filling the frame and the person's torso and hands cropped at the top.

Lettering Thigh Quote Text Bow tie

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now hush, the lot of you, and pass the sugar, because this is the bit about the stranger who stepped off the Thursday bus in Hollin Cross with rain on his bow tie and a pair of cardboard spectacles, red and blue, folded in his waistcoat pocket. Mrs Aske at the tea rooms swore he had a face like a clock that had been wound backwards. He asked her the way to the picture house, then asked how many folk had been born in the town since the war. When she said she couldn't rightly say, he laughed like a gate swinging on its hinge and told her he had been everywhere, nine hundred years of it, and had never once met a soul who didn't matter.

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Young Tommy Pryor was sweeping the picture house steps when the man found him. Tommy was nine, had a split lip from the Gilchrist boys, and the stranger knelt on the wet stone to look at it as though it were the most interesting thing in Yorkshire. He pressed the cardboard glasses into Tommy's hands and told him to look up at the church spire. The spire leapt out of the grey sky like something that had been waiting to be noticed. Tommy's mouth fell open. Keep them, the man said. Everyone who matters needs a pair.

The stranger was gone before the Saturday matinee, and nobody in Hollin Cross could say which road he took. Tommy grew up, went down the pit, came up again, and eventually ran the picture house himself. Every spring he hung those spectacles on the projector booth nail, where the afternoon light caught the lenses. When the grandchildren asked why a grown man kept a pair of cardboard glasses, he said it was to keep count, and that the stranger had been wrong about one thing. There was always somebody in a town this small who didn't matter, and it was up to the rest of us to go and look properly.