Small black hand-lettered tattoo reading BOYS SUCK on the lower leg above a white sock, in a lettering style and placed on the calf.

Small handwritten lettering on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a leg above a white ankle sock, with two lines of small black hand-lettered text reading BOYS SUCK. The letters are uneven and drawn in a loose, marker-like hand, with the second line set smaller beneath the first. The image is in natural colour with black ink on skin, and the frayed hem of ripped denim frames the lower half of the composition.

Lettering Calf Text Phrase Word Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The coconut shy had stood on the same patch of Hackney Marshes for thirty-one years, and my nan had never once let a boy win on the first throw. That was her rule, kept the way she kept her change, in a tin under the counter with an elastic band round it. So when Kieran Dunn knocked three coconuts off the rail with one lazy underarm toss and grinned at the queue, I knew the week was going to go badly.

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I had a fat black marker in my back pocket, borrowed from Ray, the sign-writer who painted the names along the dodgem cars and let me sweep his trestle in exchange for brushes. Nobody looks at the back of a coconut shy. The prices were chalked on a sheet of ply that leaned against the rail, with a bare strip along the bottom gone pale from the rain. I wrote BOYS SUCK across it in capitals that wobbled like a loose tent peg. Then I stood back, and it looked so fair and so true that I went over the letters again, the nib squeaking.

Nan found it at close, when the generator was coughing and the lights along the Waltzer were going out one by one. She read it with her glasses pushed up on her head, then took the marker from my hand without a word. Underneath, in letters no bigger than a fingernail, she wrote NOT RAY, because Ray had mended the generator in the rain without being asked, and handed the marker back.

Kieran came round on Sunday, read the board twice with his hands in his pockets, and bought a raffle ticket for a teddy he clearly didn't want. He paid in coppers, counted out slowly, and said, "Fair enough." Nan gave him a coconut anyway, and I didn't say anything, because the ply had already been turned to face the crowd.