Close-up of a red stamp-style VOID tattoo with blue-grey lettering beneath it on an upper arm.

Red VOID stamp tattoo on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A red outlined stamp reading VOID is tattooed across the upper arm, with the letters filled in solid red and a red border framing the word at a slant. Blue-grey script and illegible lettering run beneath and through the stamp, and more blue-grey lettering appears along the bottom edge of the frame. The shot is taken close up and slightly off-centre, with a small part of a person's torso and a white top visible at the right edge.

Lettering Upper arm Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pit hooter has gone twice before you find the stamp in the top drawer, where Mr Ashworth left it the day he went to Newcastle and never came back. Its rubber face is worn to a rough ghost, but the letters still read backwards in the dust of the pad: VOID. You hold it over the Dunn file for a long while, listening to the lamp-room men shouting across the yard.

Keep reading

The file is thin. A dead man's wages, a widow's form, a compensation claim with a crooked signature from the medical officer. Beneath the typed lines sit the pencilled notes the men of the lodge have added, names and dates in blue-grey script, and a row of little crosses where each one was counted up the shaft. You know what the form says. It says the roof came down at the face and Dunn was under it for four hours. It does not say the manager came down with a torch and told the others to keep digging.

You press the stamp down. It is heavier than you expected, and the ink bleeds into the grain of the paper, red and clean, slanting across the claim as if the page itself had been struck. Outside, the cage clanks and somebody begins to sing, badly, the way men sing when they think no one will ask them to stop.

The next morning the clerk from head office reads the file, sees the red slant of the word, and nods. The claim is struck. Nothing about the widow changes except the postmark. You wash your hands at the basin for a long time, but the ink stays in the creases of your knuckles, faint and red, the way a name stays on a list long after the man has gone home.