Close-up of a black script tattoo reading This is not for you on the inner wrist, with the word you in red.

Script quote on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close-up of a tattoo on the inner wrist reading This is not for you followed by three dots, in flowing cursive script. The letters are solid black except for the word you, which is filled in red, and the ellipsis trails off to the right. The lines are bold and even, with the photo taken straight on and the skin lit evenly against a pale background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Script Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways off the canal since seven, and you have been pretending not to watch the box under Mrs Okonedo's awning. It is a biscuit tin, dented at one corner, and someone has written on its lid in marker that has run in the wet: Letters, 1950s, do not sell. You have sold everything else on the table. Mrs Okonedo has gone to the van for tea, and the tin sits there with its lid askew.

Keep reading

You lift the lid because the rain is loud and nobody is looking. Inside are envelopes soft as cloth, addressed in a looping hand to a Mr Albert Fenn at a terrace on Gallow Lane. Most are unopened. On top sits a single sheet folded in three, and the first line, written in a deep blue ink that has bled slightly into the paper, reads: This is not for you... The last word has been gone over in red, as if the writer changed their mind halfway through the sentence and wanted the change seen.

Mrs Okonedo returns with two cups and finds you holding it. She doesn't take it from you. She says her mother kept the tin under a bed in Lagos for thirty years and never once opened it, and that she only ever brought it to market because she couldn't bear to throw it away. Then she hands you a tea and says the rest is yours to decide, which is a strange thing for a woman to say about a stranger's post.

You fold the letter back along its creases. Behind you the awning drums with water. You slide the sheet into your coat, meaning to return it, and somewhere between the stall and the bus stop you realise the trailing dots have stayed with you all the way, like the last of the rain.