Script slogan tattoo on an arm

It said what every bargee was muttering that year, when the tolls went up and the boats got moved along from their moorings. Ada had paint from a Thursday market stall and a brush she'd made from the tail of a dead cat, and she lettered the thing herself in a hand like a spider on a long walk. Her letters climbed uphill. She got the middle of the word wrong, put a t where an e should sit, and she never once fixed it. 'Spelling's for people who've been told what to spell,' she said, and the men in their pressed coats couldn't argue without sounding like schoolmasters.

The board came down in March. A sign-writer from the city brought a new one, clean and correct, and bolted it to the beam with brass screws. Nobody stopped to read it. They walked past it the way you'd walk past a bus timetable. The old board sat in Ada's shed, and every night the bargees went and looked at it by lamplight, tracing the wrong letters with their fingers, grinning at the crooked climb of the words.

One morning the new sign had gone, and the lock beam bore the old words again, in fresh black paint, uphill, with a t where the e should be. Nobody ever owned up. Ada only wiped her brush on her apron and said the water board could come and see her about it. That beam still has the crooked word on it, and the children on the cut learn to read it before they learn their own names.