Black lettering reading We're all mad here set inside a spade outline with blue filigree swirls, tattooed on the outer thigh.

Spade with 'We're all mad here' lettering on thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A spade shape contains the words We're all mad here in bold black script lettering, with the letters forming the shape of the spade. Blue linework of curling filigree swirls frames the top and tip of the spade, and the scrolls echo the lettering's flowing forms. The tattoo sits on the outer thigh and is shown straight on against pale skin, with a dark garment at the top edge of the frame.

Lettering Thigh Spade Lettering Quote Swirl Filigree Playing card

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top at Hollis Brothers has sagged since the spring, and you are the only one still checking the guy ropes at dusk. Mr Pell has stopped counting the takings aloud. Your act is the card throw: a single black spade you flick across the ring so it sticks in the centre pole, and the crowd gasps because in twelve years it has never missed.

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Tonight there are eleven people in the stands, and a girl in a blue coat who keeps mouthing the words painted on the banner above the entrance. Pell finds you by the horse trailers. "They won't pay for another month of this," he says. You tell him the spade has never missed. He says nothing is missed when nobody is watching.

You take the card from your sleeve and turn it over. The pips are blue ink now, the swirls curling out from the corners like frost on a window. Across the middle, in letters looped into the shape of the spade, are the words you lettered the winter the troupe was young: we're all mad here. Pell laughs for the first time in weeks and says it is the truest thing on the bill.

You throw. The spade skims past the pole, slides under the tarpaulin and lodges in the one place it always did, the centre of the ring where the sawdust is deepest. Pell walks out to pull it free, then leaves it where it landed. The girl in the blue coat claps alone.