Close-up of a small black fine line tattoo reading The End in mixed script and serif lettering on the inner forearm.

The End lettering on an arm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a small tattoo reading "The END", with a looping script "the" above capitalised serif letters "END". The linework is thin and even, in a single dark ink with no visible shading. The text sits near the centre of the frame on pale skin, with a dark wooden floor blurred in the background.

Lettering Forearm Word Text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Vennet crossing ever asked to see the last page of anything, so when Teodor Lind pulled up in a grey Skoda with a film tin on the passenger seat, I had to ask what was in it. Nineteen years in the glass booth had taught me that the things people carry are the things they are least ready to explain.

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He set the tin on the counter and opened it. Inside was a single reel of old celluloid, brittle at the edges, and he told me his grandfather had run the picture house in Sarn until the roof came in one wet March. The reels were family property, he said, and he was taking the last one to a restorer across the river who did not trust the post. I held the strip up to the light panel. Most of the frames were ordinary: a woman at a railway platform, a dog asleep on a step. The final card had been hand-lettered, a looping script word over three plain capitals, THE END, the sort of thing my own father used to mount on the wall of his workshop.

Regulations said I should log it as a commercial import and charge the duty. I wrote the entry in the register, then sat for a while with the pen above the box marked remarks. In the end I wrote nothing there and stamped his declaration ADMITTED, the ink still wet when I pushed it back under the glass.

He thanked me and drove off towards the bridge with the tin on the seat beside him, and I watched his tail lights until the road bent into the pines. Some endings are just the word that closes a thing, and I was glad to be the one who let that one through.