Close view of a small black lettering tattoo reading BAD on the side of a person's ribcage, under a raised arm, in a black and grey style.

Small BAD lettering on side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A person wearing a black wrap top and a white cracked-pattern skirt stands with one arm across their body, showing the side of their torso. A small, thin black word, BAD, is written in simple hand-drawn capital letters on the skin beneath the upper arm. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the soft, warm-toned background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Ribs Word Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Haldon Cross could say who first chalked BAD on the back wall of the infants' room. It was there when the Thackeray girls started school, and it was still there when they left, a word in capitals as high as a boy's shoulder, the letters a little lopsided, as if written in a hurry or a fright. Each September the new teacher scrubbed at it with a wet cloth, and each October it came back, faint and stubborn, like a bruise.

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Twenty-five years on, the class of 1989 met in the same hall for a reunion, with squash in plastic cups and a raffle for a tin of shortbread. Old Mr Pelham, the caretaker, had kept the wall as it was. He led them to it with one hand on his hip. "Your word," he said. "Go on, then. Tell me what it was for."

Nobody answered at first. Then Ruth Ashdown, who had once been sent to the corner for talking, said it had started as a dare. Whoever said the word aloud had to stand on the radiator for a minute with their eyes shut. Nobody ever wanted to be the one to take it, so the word stayed, and every child in that room had taken a turn at being bad for the length of a breath.

They fell quiet. Mr Pelham took a stub of chalk from his waistcoat and held it out to Ruth. She climbed onto a chair, wrote a small word beneath the old one, and stepped down. It said BRAVE. The caretaker left the chalk on the sill, and in the morning it was still there, the old word showing faintly through the new one.