Bold black block lettering reading WAL STAR MART tattooed across a person's lower back above jeans and a brown belt, in a lettering style.

Wal-Mart lettering across lower back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a person's lower back, with a shirt pulled up at each side, showing the words WAL and MART in bold black block capitals separated by a small black star. The letters are solid black with clean edges and sit horizontally across the centre of the lower back, with plain skin around them. The image is a close, straight-on shot in indoor light, with jeans and a brown belt visible below.

Lettering Back Star Text Logo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ladder shivers against the seawall at Skerry Bay, and you hold the brush between your teeth because both hands are busy steadying the board. Mrs Pilling from across the road has been standing on her step since eight, arms folded, as if staring hard enough could straighten the sign. The old lettering, GULL HOUSE, has gone to flakes like pastry. She wants it fresh. She wants the star back, the small five-pointed one her late husband insisted on, which splits the name down the middle and makes the guests stop and squint at it.

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You thin the black enamel the way your old master taught you in Hull, thin as weak tea, so it sinks into the grain instead of sitting on top like a lie. The letters go on first. G, U, L, then a clean gap, then the star, which you rule from a cardboard template you have kept since your apprenticeship, soft at the corners from handling. Then the rest of the name. The wind off the water tries to lift the wet paint and you work faster than is comfortable, breathing through your nose.

"Will it be too big, the star?" Mrs Pilling calls up. You tell her it will be exactly the width of the space between the two halves of the name, no more. She says the star was never meant for anyone but the two of them, and that the guests will not notice it anyway. You say the ones who matter always notice what has been put back carefully.

At dusk you climb down and she is still on her step. The paint is tacky but holding. Behind her, lamps come on in the parlour windows one by one, and the wet star catches the last of the light off the sea, a small bright point sitting in the gap where the name is broken, exactly where he would have wanted it.