Black and grey photo of the word JOY in small serif capitals tattooed on the upper arm, just below a grey t-shirt sleeve.

Small serif JOY on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of an upper arm with the word JOY tattooed in small, upright serif capitals. The letters are solid black with clean, even linework and no shading. The plain white background and grey t-shirt sleeve keep the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Upper arm Word Lettering Serif

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas had painted the names on the fleet's hulls for nineteen years, so he could tell from the way Ruth Pengelly held her mug that she was not going to ask for anything small. The boats had come in short again. Gulls worked the slipway, and across the harbour the new hull sat on her cradle with no name on her transom, only the pale ghost of the last one, which had gone under off the Smalls in February with two men aboard who were pulled out alive.

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"Serif," she said. "Upright. Not the curly sort they use on tins." He had a stencil book in the shed with a dozen faces in it, and he spent the afternoon pencilling capitals on the back of an old tide table until the J hooked the way his father had taught him. Ruth watched him draw the O twice. She wanted it round, she said, round like a buoy seen from a long way off.

The word was not for the new hull. She had already chosen that name and would not tell him it. This was for the wheelhouse door of the old boat, salvaged from the mud at Padstow with its paint scorched away. Her husband had shouted the word every time the net came up heavy, and it was the only thing he ever said that the other men repeated back to him on the quay.

Tomas mixed black enamel, the only colour he trusted on salt wood, and laid the letters down with a rigger brush so steady it surprised him. When he finished he stood back. Ruth touched the O with one finger, then smoothed the wet edge with her thumb. "Leave it," she said. "It'll weather into the grain. Let the sea argue with it." Behind them the tide came up over the slipway, and the gulls rose all at once.