Black script lettering reading fuck cancer on a forearm, with a thin heartbeat line running out from both ends of the words.

Script lettering with heartbeat line on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script tattoo on the inner forearm, reading fuck cancer, with a thin heartbeat-style line extending from each end of the lettering. The linework is fine and even, and the ink is solid black against light skin. A dark surface and a partly visible skull print sit behind the arm, with a pale object at the bottom of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script text Heartbeat line Ecg line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Maud,

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The Bramleys at Hollins Farm have started dropping before the pickers reach them, and Dad blames the dry August, but I think they are just tired of holding on. On Tuesday I found an old wooden picking crate behind the press shed, the one Ruth Ashdown used to stand on to reach the top rows. Someone has painted on its side in black, in that loose joined-up hand from the seed catalogue, the words the vicar would never say aloud in church. Under them runs a thin line that climbs and drops like the pulse on a hospital monitor.

I asked Ruth who'd done it. She went red to the ears and said it was Tom, who'd had a go with the signwriter's brush after closing time, and that the wasps had got to him more than anything. She said the line was his idea, that it should jump about so you knew the thing was still going. Her mum had sat up with a monitor in the back bedroom for six weeks, and every time the green line flattened, Ruth said the apples came down an inch lower on the branch.

We carried the crate down to the lane together and set it under the Discovery tree where the light comes through the leaves. Ruth filled it with windfalls, and the wasps came for the sugar, and neither of us swatted them. Tom leaned on the gate with his hands in his pockets, and when I asked whether those words were the right ones for a crate, he said they were the only ones he could find that didn't need apologising for.

Write back soon and tell me if the Cox's are ready. I'll send you a bag of the windfalls, though the wasps will get most of them first.

Love, Ellen