Two black and grey script words tattooed one on each thigh, with swirl flourishes, below denim shorts.

Script words on both thighs

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two thighs are shown below denim shorts, each with a script word tattooed in black and grey ink. The left word is in a bold italic script with shaded letters, and the right word is in a looped script with a decorative swirl beneath it. The lettering is sharp and the shading gives the letters depth, with the image framed tightly on the legs against a plain background.

Lettering Thigh Script Lettering Word Swirl Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Oakes wanted the two words up on the bakery fascia by Saturday, and he wanted them to look as if they had always been there. I had been grinding black and gold leaf for three weeks without being trusted with a brush that mattered, so I read his sketch upside down out of habit. WHOA ran across the left, leaning like a man who had just missed a step, and LIFE sat on the right with a curl of swirl trailing beneath it like smoke off a struck match.

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Mrs Ada Pell had commissioned it after the flour merchant on Tanner Street sold her the wrong grade of flour for the third time. She wanted the people of Harbledown to slow down when they passed her window, to stop and breathe before they bought their loaves. Whoa for the hurry, she said, and life for the rest of it. Oakes nodded as though this were sensible, then gave me the smaller brush and told me to keep my wrist loose.

On the second evening my hand jerked at the loop of the W and a bead of black ran down into the shadow I had been so careful with. I held my breath. Oakes leaned in, studied it through his spectacles, and grunted. Leave it, he said. Nobody reads a letter that's perfect. They read the one with a bit of life in it.

On Saturday a boy with a satchel stopped under the sign, lips moving as he sounded out the first word, then the second. He stood on the step with his hand on the glass, not going in or going on. Then the bell over the door rang and Mrs Pell came out wiping her hands, and the boy looked up at her, and at the gold on the fascia, and said, Whoa, very quietly, as if he had been told to.