Black and grey script lettering with a flourish and shading on the back of a man's hand, with a wristwatch on the wrist.

Script tattoo on the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a man's clenched hand showing black and grey script lettering with a looping flourish across the back of the hand, with some shaded forms beside the letters. A metal wristwatch with a mesh strap sits on the wrist, and the man wears a dark leather jacket. The shallow focus keeps the tattoo and watch sharp against a soft, pale background.

Lettering Hand Script Flourish Bird Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down on the flour sacks and mind the proving tins, because the dough doesn't wait for anybody's sorrow. It was gone three in the morning at the bakery on Coldharbour Lane, and Nell Ashby was writing on the back of a delivery docket with a pencil stub, the way her mother had written every loaf order since before the war. The lamp hummed. Outside, the milk float rattled past with one bottle left rolling in the back.

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She didn't write Alfie's name plain. Her mother would have called that common. She looped the letters long and slow, the way the copperplate man taught at the parish school, and let the tail of the A run out across the page until it curled like the spring of a pocket watch. Then she drew a bird perched on the last stroke, a swallow with its wings folded tight, because that was the only bird she had ever seen Alfie draw. Three lines of ink and it looked more like a cross than a message, but she knew what it said.

The ship had gone out of Tilbury in March, and nobody had heard a word since. Still, a loaf takes four hours from dough to crust, and she had always believed a thing could travel that far if you gave it enough heat. So she folded the docket small, pressed it into the middle of the tin loaf before the final proof, and sealed the seam with her thumb.

The bread came out golden at half past five. Nell wrapped it in brown paper and handed it up to the dockside driver with his cap pulled low, then watched the van roll towards the river. Months later a cook in Cape Town cut into a loaf that had come in on a ship's stores and found a bird baked into the heel, and that is how Nell learned the swallow had flown.