Close-up of black and grey gothic lettering reading STAY TRUE across the knuckles of two hands, with shaded letterforms and a dark background.

STAY TRUE knuckle lettering

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are held together with the letters of STAY TRUE tattooed one letter per finger across the knuckles, in ornate gothic-style capitals. The letters use bold black outlines with grey shading that gives them a dimensional, metallic look. The image is almost entirely black and grey, with a dark background and a blurred graphic on a shirt below the hands.

Lettering Hand Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The buyers from Boston wanted the canvas sign gone before they would sign anything, so Mr Halloran sent for me on a Tuesday with a tin of black enamel and a face like wet cardboard. I had lettered every wagon on the Halloran Brothers' books for thirty-one years. He wanted the words painted out, two letters a day, and then the lorries could leave the field in Lincolnshire.

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I did not paint them out. I sat on an upturned crate by the menagerie wagon with the old board across my knees, its varnish cracked into a map of small islands. The capitals were my father's work, outlined heavy as ironwork, every stroke shaded grey so the letters looked cast from something cold and expensive. Even wet, the shading caught what light there was. Mr Halloran had stood under those words at every opening night for forty years, shouting them at crowds who were mostly thinking about their tea.

On the last night the ring was empty and only one bulb burned above the sawdust. Mr Halloran came in with two mugs and found me painting a new line beneath the old one, in plain white on black: THE GREAT ESCAPE WAS ALWAYS THIS FIELD. He read it twice, then took the brush off me and added a small grey shadow under the final E, the way my father used to, without asking.

In the morning the Bostonians took the big top and left the board. I nailed it to the ring barrier where the rain could reach it. By the time the lorries had gone, the grey shading had run down the wood in long, dark streaks, and the words were still there, stubborn and shining.