Colour tattoo of a yellow-gold towel with black lettering reading The Terrible Towel, A Pittsburgh Original, across the forearm.

The Terrible Towel forearm tattoo

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo shows a gold and orange towel with soft folds and shading, carrying bold black lettering that reads The Terrible Towel, with a smaller banner line above and a line reading A Pittsburgh Original below. The towel is rendered with heavy black outlines, smooth gradients and dimpled texture, and the lettering sits centrally across the arm. The wearer's torso and black sleeve frame the shot, with another coloured tattoo partly visible on the upper arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, the lot of you, and keep your hands off the lift buttons, because this is the one about the towel and the lift and the bargain they struck. Your great-uncle Dennis came home from America in nineteen seventy-eight with one suitcase, a cough he never shook off, and a gold towel the colour of a wet digestive biscuit. Big black letters ran across it, and a man on the wireless had told the whole of Pittsburgh to wave it at the stadium whenever the other side got the ball. Dennis waved it at everything. He waved it at the bus, the gasman, the vicar, and once at a pigeon that had it coming.

Keep reading

Then came the January the lift on the fourteenth floor packed in for good. Fourteen flights of stairs with a fridge on your back is no way to live, so Dennis stood in the lift well with the towel held high and shouted at the cables like they owed him money. Nobody believed the old box would listen. But next morning the doors stood open on our landing, and the towel lay folded on the floor of the car, dry as a bone, with a sticky note in biro that said only, Ground floor and back, we're square.

Dennis never said what he'd promised it. He just kept the towel on the hook behind the door of flat 1407 until the day he died, and the lift never once stuck after that. Now, if you're going down to the shop, take the stairs, because the lift has been waiting fifty years for a Dennis to come back and wave that towel at it, and I'm not having it think the family's gone soft.

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