Black script lettering reading Bieber Feaver on an upper arm, on a person wearing a navy shirt.

Script lettering on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of black script lettering across the upper arm, with the words written in two lines that follow the curve of the arm. The linework is bold and mostly solid with some soft grey shading along the strokes. The shot is taken at an angle with a navy shirt and a blue seat at the edges of the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Script Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the range and mind the coal dust on the settle, for this is the tale of Tom Rieber and the summer the fever came up the valley with the Bristol wagons. Tom had the surest hands in the Garw pits. He could cut a pit prop from ash so true it rang like a bell when you knocked it, and the overman would let no one else touch the saw.

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The fever took the Feaver girls first, Ada and little Sel, three days apart. Their mother, Hannah, walked the length of the terraces with a lamp and a cracked slate, and nobody would open a door to her. Tom heard her singing the two names on the hill road that night, so he fetched his needle and a pot of lamp-black and sat on the chapel wall until dawn, writing the names out in careful script, one line above the other, bent round the curve of his arm so they would travel wherever he went.

The doctor from Merthyr came up on the Tuesday. He took one look at the lettering, then at the two girls, and sat with them until the fever broke. Folk said it was the ink that saved them, though Tom always said it was only the walking.

Years later, when the colliery had shut and the letters had softened to grey at their edges, Hannah would still press her thumb to his arm on the bus to Cardiff and say the names aloud, just to hear them keep their shape.