Close-up photo of black script lettering reading Mommy with a red ribbon in the middle, tattooed on the inner wrist, in a lettering style.

Script word Mommy with red ribbon on wrist

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

The subject is the word Mommy in black cursive script, with a red awareness ribbon drawn over the letters between the M and the rest of the word. The lettering uses bold, flowing strokes with some shading, and the red ribbon is the only colour in the design. The tattoo sits on the inner wrist, shown straight on in a close, slightly angled photo against a plain background.

Lettering Other Script Lettering Ribbon Awareness ribbon Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mahl stick rested on my knuckles the way Dad had taught me, and I loaded the brush twice before the first stroke of the capital M, because copperplate leaves no room for a second go. Mrs Holloway wanted the word on the transom of her late husband's cutter, the Marigold, and she had written it out herself on the back of a tide table: Mommy, with the double m, because that was how the grandchildren said it. She didn't want anything fancy. She wanted the black to look like it had been there since the boat was launched.

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She also wanted a red ribbon looped through the first letter. She had cut the strip from a spool she kept in her handbag and laid it on the bench for me to match. I told her gold leaf under a painted ribbon would crack when the boat went out in salt. She said the Marigold had been going out in salt for thirty-one years and had never once cracked, so I should trust the boat. I did the ribbon last, lifting the red where it crossed the black so it looked tied on rather than painted over.

We worked through a wet Tuesday with the radio on low. I shaded the downstrokes with a finer brush so each letter seemed to lift off the wood, the way the old signwriters in Lowestoft used to do before the vinyl cutters took the work. By four the rain had eased and the harbour light had come on across the water, though it was still too early for it to mean anything.

On Friday she came back alone and stood at the transom for a long while, her thumb moving over the M without quite touching the paint. Then she asked whether I could do a smaller word on the inside of her wrist, somewhere nobody would see unless she showed them. I asked what it should say. She said she'd never needed to spell it for anyone, and she still didn't.