Close photograph of a pale forearm with small grey script reading stay gold, set against a brick wall above a wooden table.

Stay gold script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pale forearm is raised against a brick wall, with the wrist bent and the hand relaxed near the top of the frame. The words stay gold are written in thin, slightly joined grey-black script on the inner forearm, with the lettering sitting clearly against the skin. The background of cream and tan bricks and the warm wooden table are softly lit, keeping the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Forearm Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the band is on its break and I have only the one voice left in me tonight. Ruby Feeney ran the floor at the Palais on Sorrel Street the year the gas went off, and she had a saying for every couple who came in wanting a waltz they couldn't afford. Stay gold, she'd say, pressing a sixpence into the cloakroom girl's hand. Nobody asked her what she meant. You didn't ask Ruby things.

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The Palais had a floor sprung like a ship's deck, and in winter the gilt paint on the balcony rails flaked off onto the shoulders of dancers below, so that by the end of a night everyone glittered a little, whether they liked it or not. A boy called Tomasz Wren came in one Saturday wearing his brother's demob suit and carrying no money for the cloakroom. He danced every dance with the same girl, a seamstress named Idris Hale, who had sewn a dozen brass buttons onto her cuffs that morning because she had nothing else to wear. Ruby watched them from the rail and said nothing.

Near midnight the lights failed, as they always did, and the old pianist played on by the glow of a cigarette tin lid. In the dark Tomasz said he would be gone to the docks by Monday, and Idris said she knew it, and that was the trouble. Ruby climbed down the stairs with a candle and found them both standing very still, gold dust catching the flame. Stay gold, she told them, though it was not clear which of them she meant, and the candle guttered, and the dance went on.