Colour traditional tattoo of a grey tooth with an orange filling and a FILLER banner, placed on the arm near the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tooth with filling and FILLER banner

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A tooth with a visible filling and a small crack or pick mark sits above a curved banner reading FILLER. The tooth is shaded in grey with pitted texture, the filling is orange, and the banner is purple with a blue outline. The design is centred on bare skin, with other tattoos visible around its edges.

Traditional Other Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chair above the Co-op had been my father's, and it still tipped back with a groan that carried down to the pit road. On Thursday evenings, after the night shift, the men came up the stairs with their jaws swollen and their pride in their pockets, because the Board's dentist in Aberdale would not look at a collier without a letter from the colliery doctor. I had a drill that whined like a gull and a tin of grey amalgam that smelt faintly of pennies.

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Ernie Wrigley came up one February with a back molar split like a cracked bell. He sat with his cap on his knee and his eyes on the ceiling while I dug out the rot. "Make it a proper job, Dilys," he said round the cotton wool. "I'm not having some lad from Aberdale tell me my teeth are a disgrace." I packed the cavity in layers, pressed the filling flush and asked him to bite down on the stick. He went white, then he laughed, and then he paid me in three eggs and a pound of Sunday tea.

Three weeks later he was back with a sleeve rolled up and a grin like a schoolboy. The lads at the baths had dared him to have his new filling inked, and he had gone straight to the man over the bookies who did anchors and hearts for the navy boys. The banner curled under a grey tooth with a bright orange plug in it, and the word across the front was FILLER, in purple letters with a blue edge.

"Says what you are, that does," he said, pushing the sleeve higher so the bar lamp caught it. "Stops the rot getting to the rest of us." I told him it was the daftest thing I had ever seen, and I bought him a half on the house. Every Thursday since, I have watched him lift his glass with that tooth grinning at me from his arm, and I have never once been able to tell him that I was the one who needed the mending.