Close photo of a small black lettering tattoo reading tattoo on the upper arm, just below a grey t-shirt sleeve.

The word tattoo on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is the word tattoo written in a lowercase, serif-style typeface in black ink. The lettering has solid, slightly uneven strokes, and the photo shows it sitting on the outer side of the upper arm with a grey t-shirt sleeve above and another person's hand holding a phone at the right edge. The image has a warm colour cast and a soft, handheld phone-camera finish.

Lettering Upper arm Word Tattoo Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Bramleys started dropping in the second week of August, and by the third they were coming down on the shed roof after dark like someone who could not stop knocking. Grandad Walt lay awake in the spare bed counting them. 'That's the tattoo,' he said, turning over. I thought he was making a joke until he explained: the drum the army beat at dusk to call the sentries in, the sound a camp made when the day was finished with it.

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He had been a drummer boy in a war he never discussed, except through the orchard. Every September he climbed the ladder with a bucket and a stub of pencil and wrote the day's tally inside the shed door in his neat, slightly wobbly hand, with the same word heading each column. I asked him once why not just write apples. He said apples were what fell. Tattoo was what you did about it, the nightly noise you let roll you up and carry you indoors.

The year he died, nobody picked. The windfalls rotted in the long grass and wasps staggered drunk through the rows. In late August I went up alone with his clipboard. The roof began its beat just after the light went, slow at first, then faster, then a scatter of single knocks as the last fruit gave up. I stood among the trunks and listened until it stopped.

Then I climbed the ladder, found the pencil wedged in the door frame, and wrote the word at the top of a clean column. I left the tally empty. Something would fall tonight, and I wanted to hear it before I decided what it counted as.