Black script lettering with flourishes tattooed on the upper thigh of each leg, above lace shorts trim.

Script lettering on both thighs

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare legs are shown from the front, each with black script lettering and decorative swirls tattooed around the upper thigh. The words are written in a flowing, calligraphic script with thin, varied linework and a few light shaded areas. The tattoos are in black ink on a warm skin tone, with the lace trim of shorts visible at the bottom of the frame.

Lettering Thigh Script Lettering Flourish Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags had been snowed in at the Hollin Gate Inn for four days when the sign-writer's daughter took over the bar with a jam jar of brown gall ink. It stained her fingers the same as the proper stuff her father used. She sat at the end of the counter with a hand mirror propped against the cruet and practised backwards, because the lettering on the coaching window had to read true from the road.

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The landlord, Dennis Teale, wanted the name of the inn in a curl that would go over the door. Mags drew it four times. Each time the loops came out too fat, like the tails of a dog wagging its whole body. Outside, the snow kept falling past the lamp in lazy handfuls, and nobody came in but the wind.

On the fifth morning she got the flourish right. She wrote the name on a scrap of brown paper, folded it so the ink bled through, and laid it face down on the warm wood of the bar. When she turned it over, the letters had doubled into one wavering line, mirrored and softer, the way a word looks in a window at dusk.

Dennis read it upside down, tapped his nose, and said the road would be clear by Thursday. Mags pulled on her gloves and took the paper with her. She pinned it above the till, face to the wall, where it still hangs. Nobody has ever asked her why.