Close-up of a fine line black script letter B tattooed on the side of a finger, with a grey fabric background.

Script letter B on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a hand with a single script letter B tattooed on the side of the index finger. The letter is drawn in thin, even black linework with looping flourishes and no shading. The soft grey fabric behind the hand and a small blurred plastic container at the top left make up the composition.

Fine line Lettering Hand Letter Script Initial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okafor's stall sat under the iron canopy at the back of Kirkgate Market, and on wet Thursdays the rain blew in sideways and pooled on my ledger. I sold steel nibs and bottles of iron gall ink, and every week somebody asked me to write a name on the back of a card. Most wanted capitals. Dora wanted her B done in the old copperplate her grandmother had used on the register at a chapel in Bradford.

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"Make the loop fat at the top," she said, tapping the counter with a wet glove. "Then let the tail run off like it's got somewhere better to be."

I had a fine No. 1 nib and dipped it twice before the stroke came right. The B climbed and folded over itself, two bellies stacked like rooms in a narrow house, and the flourish at the foot trailed off the card as though it meant to keep going. She held it up to the grey light from the gutter and didn't say anything for a while, which I took as a good sign.

She came back the following Thursday with no card at all. She wanted the same letter, smaller, somewhere it wouldn't be seen by anyone who didn't already know it was there. I told her a letter that clever needed room to breathe, and that anything squeezed would lose its curls. She shrugged and said it only had to hold on.

I wrote it out for her on a scrap of brown paper, the loops tight as a fist, and she folded the paper twice and put it in her pocket. Outside, the rain kept on, and the market lights came on one stall at a time.