Black and grey photo of a forearm with fine script lettering reading a quote about playing a dangerous game, with three short marks below.

Script quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a forearm with a fine script lettering tattoo reading a phrase about playing a dangerous game and winning, with the top line cropped by the frame. Three short upright marks sit beneath the words. The linework is thin and even, rendered in greyscale against a plain background.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Quote Lettering Tally marks

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain was running off the awnings of Harrowgate market the morning Tomas Vell sat down across from the fishmonger's boy with a deck of cards in one hand and his dead mother's ring in the other. Nobody liked the ring being wagered. Nobody much liked Tomas either, but the stallholders stopped stacking crates to watch, because a man who bets his mother's ring before dinner is either mad or certain.

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The boy was called Lem, and he had won eleven pounds off the cheese man the week before, so he was certain. They played three-card on an upturned tray, the pennies hopping on the wet wood. Tomas lost the first hand, and the second, and by noon the crowd had gathered under the teapot stall, damp and cheerful. He took a stub of pencil from behind his ear and scratched a mark into the tin lid of the teapot man's cash box. Then another. Then a third. 'Three times I've been the fool,' he said. 'Keep counting for me, son.'

Lem did keep counting, and that was his mistake, because the fourth hand was the one that mattered and Tomas had stopped looking at the cards. He watched the rain run off the boy's cuffs and the way Lem's thumb tapped the tray when he was nervous. The queen came up. Then the second queen. The crowd made the noise a crowd makes when someone has been right about something for once.

Tomas pocketed the pennies, slid the ring back onto his finger, and wrote one last line in the wet on the tray with his thumb: a dangerous game, and I won. Lem never forgave him. The teapot man still keeps that cash box, and the three marks are there under the grease if you care to look.