Small black lettering on the top of a finger reads Sm:)e, with the colon and bracket forming a smiley in place of the i.

Smile lettering with smiley on finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with the word Smile tattooed across the top of one finger, where the letter i is replaced by a colon and closing bracket forming a smiley face. The lettering is solid black in a simple, clean sans serif style. A thin gold ring sits on another finger against a dark, softly blurred background.

Lettering Hand Smile Smiley face Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass bell over the scullery door has been ringing since six, and you are the only one in the kitchen who can tell the coal man's knock from the telegraph boy's. Mrs Pennock has left you the breakfast ledger, a stub of pencil and orders that nobody is to hear the sea has come up over the lower step again.

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Room four has written a complaint on the back of a tide table. The damp has got into the wardrobe, the Major's trousers have shrunk in the wash, and the gentleman in six wants his egg boiled four minutes exactly. You answer every note in the same careful hand, and at the foot of each you draw the little face Mrs Pennock taught you, a colon and a bracket, because she says a complaint folded small is easier to forgive when it ends kindly.

By the second week of September the notes have stopped being complaints. Room four asks for a second pot of tea and signs off with a face. Room six sends down his shoes with a request to polish them as though they were going to a wedding. You begin leaving the face in the margin of the bills, then a word beside it, just Smile, pressed hard enough to show through the paper.

On the last Saturday the gentleman from six finds the ledger on the hall table, open at your page. He says nothing about it. He takes the pencil and, under your bracket, makes his own, the same shape, a little wobbly at the curve. Then he leaves a sixpence on the counter for the girl who minds the cups. You put the coin in your apron pocket and go down to the water to see whether the tide has gone out yet.