Small black serif letter V lettering tattoo on the wrist, with blurred green foliage and a pale flower behind the arm.

Serif letter V on the wrist

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black capital letter V with serif finishes sits on the side of the wrist, close to the hand. The linework is bold and even, with no visible shading, and the ink appears crisp against the skin. The skin fills most of the frame, with blurred green leaves and a pale pink flower in the background.

Lettering Other Initial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last V in the drawer had a nick on its left serif, and Ada Pollard turned it under the lamp for a long time before deciding it would do. The foundry in Sheffield had shut in the spring, and the cabinets of type were going to a skip on Monday unless somebody claimed them. She had come for the lead ems and the brass rules, but the V kept catching her eye, bold and square, the sort of capital a printer only needed once in a long while.

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Her father had been a sign-writer, and he had taught her that a V was two strokes that agreed to meet at the bottom and never quite touched at the top. He had painted the name of the chandlery on the harbour wall with a V in the middle, and the weather had taken the colour but not the outline. She remembered standing on the quay with her hand in his coat pocket, reading the shape the sea had left behind.

On Monday she set the V in a composing stick beside a line of ordinary words, inked it with a roller that smelled of linseed, and pulled a single proof on cream card. The impression was crisp everywhere except the nick, which printed as a tiny white gap, a flaw no customer would ever see. She carried the proof down to the harbour that afternoon and found the chandlery shuttered, the wall freshly limewashed.

She pressed the proof flat against the damp stone where the old letters had been and held it there with her thumb until the card began to curl. When she lifted it away, the V had left a faint grey ghost on the wall, nicked on the left, exactly where her father would have put it.