Black cursive script reading We're broken people runs diagonally across the top of a foot, beside a small red, blue and grey abstract mark.

Script lettering across the top of a foot

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

Black cursive script reads We're broken people in a diagonal line across the top of the foot. Beside the lettering is a small abstract mark made of solid red, blue and grey blocks. The skin is lit warmly against a plain background, with the tattoo sitting across the centre of the frame.

Lettering Other Script text Abstract shape Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ovens at Harrow Lane never gave the same heat twice, so by ten to four I had learned to read the glass in the left door like weather. Gerry, who had run the night shift since before decimalisation, rapped it with a wooden spoon and said it was sulking again. We loaded the first tins anyway. Flour hung in the light from the bare bulb, and the radio on the shelf murmured the shipping forecast like a rosary nobody had asked for.

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On Thursdays a man called Lloyd came in off the first bus from the coast road. He never ordered more than a split tin and a tea he let go cold. One morning he watched me slash the loaves with a razor and asked whether the cuts were meant to open or just look as if they were trying. I told him they opened where the dough was weakest, which was the only place bread ever let anything out. He laughed in a way that sounded sore and said, 'Well, we're broken people, aren't we,' as if he were reading it off a sign. Then he folded his change into his palm and didn't look up for the rest of his tea.

I burned the second batch that day, thinking about the way he'd said it. Gerry found me at the sink with my hands in cold water and didn't scold me. He just took down a tin of greaseproof and showed me how to fold the corners so the steam had somewhere to go. Lloyd didn't come the next Thursday, or the one after.

On the third Thursday I wrapped a split tin in paper, scored its top with a clean slash, and left it on the step of the bus shelter where he waited. By the time the sun came up the bread was gone, and the loaves on the rack behind me had all split open along their cuts, the way bread is supposed to.