Black and grey photo of a small serif lettering tattoo reading Be. on the inner wrist of a raised hand with dark painted nails.

Small serif word Be. on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a hand held in a loose fist, with the inner wrist turned towards the camera. A small, simple serif word reading Be. sits on the wrist in dark grey ink, with a full stop after it. The soft lighting and plain background keep the focus on the tattoo's clean lettering and small scale.

Lettering Forearm Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Harrow Court had been broken since March, so Mr Pilling and I took the stairs on Thursdays, him one step ahead with his tartan shopping trolley bumping behind him like a dog that did not want to go out.

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He had been a signwriter for forty years, mostly on shop fronts along the Kingsway before the chains came in. He still kept a tobacco tin of brushes no thicker than a hair, and on the landing window he had once painted a single word so small you had to stoop to read it. He told me the trick was the full stop. Anyone can write a word, he said, but a word with a full stop means you have decided it is finished.

I asked him once why he never painted more than one word at a time. He said the rest was just people shouting at each other from the pavement. He preferred a quiet sign, one that let a person walk past without having to argue with it.

In March the stairs were the only thing he could manage, and by May he stopped coming down at all. His niece cleared the flat in June and gave me the tin without knowing what it was for. Inside, wrapped in a strip of old newspaper, was a card with a word on it in his careful hand, the full stop pressed so hard the paper had torn.

I took the tin to the lift on Thursday. The doors have a long pane of glass, scratched and grey. I mixed the paint the way he had shown me, sat on the bottom step with my knees up, and wrote it small in the corner where nobody would have to shout to see it. Be. I pressed the full stop down and waited for it to dry.