Black and grey knuckle tattoos spelling STAY REAL in plain block lettering across two clenched fists, with tattooed forearms visible at the sides.

STAY REAL knuckle lettering

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two clenched fists are shown front-on, with one letter tattooed on each knuckle, reading STAY across the left hand and REAL across the right. The lettering is a simple, evenly weighted sans-serif in solid black linework, with a few small dots marking the knuckles and fingers. The image is monochrome, set against a dark grey t-shirt and a white brick wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, shush now, the kettle can wait. You want the story of Wexley House, fourteen floors of damp and gossip, and the caretaker who painted two words on the lobby wall the winter the council stopped sending anyone to fix anything.

Keep reading

Nobody remembers his proper name. Everyone called him Dougie Lamp, on account of the bulb he kept replacing on the seventh landing. Every Friday he stood on the bottom step with a tin of white gloss and a brush gone soft at the tip, and he painted one word above the post boxes. Nobody asked him to. Mrs Okafor said it was vandalism. Old Pat from flat nine said it was the only thing in that building worth reading.

Then the lift cable snapped, and for three days the whole block climbed the stairs with shopping and prams and bad hips. On the third night the words on the wall had worn to nothing, so Dougie went up to the roof, sat with his back against the water tank, and waved down at the car park until someone looked up. Mrs Okafor came out with a torch and a pot of paint of her own, and when she asked what should go up next, he said, Stay. And then she said, Real, because a bloke who only stays is just a wall.

The gloss dried by morning. The lift was fixed the week after, but nobody ever painted over the words, and when people ask what Wexley House is about, I tell them it's those two words, and that you'll find both of them still there if you climb the stairs.

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