White ink lettering tattoo reading I must not tell lies across the back of a clenched hand, shown in a close photograph.

White ink script across the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a clenched fist showing the back of the hand, with handwritten-style script in white ink reading I must not tell lies over the knuckles and back of the hand. The white linework is fine and even, with the words set on two lines and a slight slant. The image is in natural colour, with the skin tone and a grey floor behind, and the composition is tightly framed on the hand.

Lettering Hand Script Text Quote White ink Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The detention room smelled of radiator dust and somebody's cheese sandwich, and Mrs Okonedo had given Tomasz Pryce a fresh biro and a clean sheet of lined paper. He wrote the line once, neatly, then looked at the clock above the door, which had stopped at twenty to four sometime during the Thatcher years and never been bothered about since.

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He had told his mum the window was already broken. He had told the head of year that the goldfish had died of natural causes, which was true in the sense that nothing about the goldfish had been unnatural. He had told Priya Lall that her drawing of a horse looked like a sofa, and she had not spoken to him until the Easter holidays. Each lie had come easily, the way a coin slides off a counter, and each had left a small cold weight in his chest that he could feel even now.

So he took the biro and, instead of writing the line a hundred times as instructed, he pressed the pen hard into the back of his own left hand and wrote it there, slanting, careful, the way his nan had taught him to write her shopping lists. It hurt less than he expected. The ink was white, a pale gel from the art cupboard that Mr Greaves swore would wipe off with a damp cloth.

When the bell went he held his fist shut all the way home. At the gate his mum asked what he had been doing, and he opened his hand and showed her, and for once there was nothing in his mouth but the truth, which tasted of plastic and was almost impossible to swallow.