Thin grey stencil outline of looping script on a finger, shown on a transfer sheet as the backing is peeled away.

Script stencil on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Flash

A hand with green painted nails holds a finger with a grey transfer stencil of looping, cursive-style lines. The stencil sits on a pale transfer sheet with its backing being peeled back. The lines are thin and single-weight, and the image is in muted natural light against a beige background.

Hand Script Stencil Loop Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the backing, Maud, peel it slow or the loops will tear and you'll be starting the whole word again. That was Arthur Pell at the fair every August, shouting over the generator while the Waltzer thudded on its hinges. He had been sign-writer to the Lovell Brothers for forty years, and the hand that once painted THE GREAT ZODIAC in gold leaf now shook too much to hold a brush straight.

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So I traced his letters onto the tissue, the long looping ones he liked, the capital L that swept back under itself like a dog settling. We worked in the caravan with the door propped open for the smell of frying onions. He would watch the pencil the way other men watch horses at Newmarket, saying lighter, lighter, until the line was no more than a breath on the paper.

The night before the last show, the Waltzer lights went out for good and the lane went quiet. He sat on the caravan step with his tin of brushes and asked me to read the sign back to him. I did. He said it sounded like somebody else's name, and I told him it was his, only written out by someone younger.

In the morning I pressed the transfer down over the ticket booth board and rubbed it with a damp cloth. When I lifted the paper the loops stayed, grey and faint on the wood, and Arthur was already up the ladder with his gold leaf, waiting for me to hand him the first letter.