# The entry scribbled out hard enough to tear the page

> A pocket address book with two legible names and one entry torn through in blue ballpoint — every family keeps somebody who survives mainly as a story written without him.

August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-black-sheep-story

A page from a pocket address book, the tab reading M. Three ruled entries. MARSH, ANNE at the top,
MOSS, D at the bottom, both still perfectly legible. Between them, one entry gone under blue
ballpoint scribbled on so hard the paper has torn.

Two names survive. The third is a hole in the page, and everybody in the family knows whose hole it
is.

## What is this page actually showing?

An ordinary contacts page with one entry deliberately destroyed rather than simply crossed out.

A line through a name is an edit — somebody moved, a number changed. This is closer to [the line
at the bottom of a letter that changes everything above it](/stories/last-line-of-a-letter)
than to an ordinary crossing-out: repeated strokes, in the same pen, pressed hard enough to break
through the paper. Whoever did it wasn't correcting a record. They were making sure it couldn't be
read again.

## Why does a torn, scribbled line say more than a portrait of an outsider?

Because it shows the family's reaction rather than the person it's reacting to.

A portrait would ask the reader to judge a face they've never met. The scribble asks nothing about
him at all — it's a record of somebody else's hand, moving back and forth over the same three
inches until the paper gave way. The family default for someone written out is closer to [the
person who took the photograph and so isn't in it](/stories/the-photographer-is-missing)
than to a placeholder outline — an absence built into how the record works, not a separate choice.

## What does the force of the scribbling actually tell you?

That erasing him took real effort, sustained past the point where a single line would have done
the job.

One stroke removes an entry from a contacts book. This took several, pressed hard enough to tear
the page — which means whoever held the pen went back to it more than once, past the point of
practical necessity. That's not information about him. It's a measurement of how much the person
holding the pen needed him gone.

## Why doesn't the design say what he actually did?

Because the family that tells this story usually doesn't say either, and the shirt is honest about
that gap rather than inventing a fill for it.

Most households with a scribbled-out relative have a rough shape of the story and disagree on the
details, or agree not to repeat them. Printing an explanation would claim a certainty nobody in the
family actually has. The torn page states what's known for certain — that somebody was removed,
and somebody removed him — and stops exactly there.

## Do I need to check with anyone before putting a real name on this?

The names belong to your own family, so there's no outside licence to clear, but a torn-out entry
is about a living person, and that changes the question.

He's presumably still alive, and a shirt broadcasting his own name as a deliberate erasure is a
much heavier thing to put in the world than most family prints. If a real name and initial are
going on the chest, that's worth thinking through with whoever in the family still has a
relationship with him, not just with whoever's paying for the shirt.

## Could this be about me instead of him?

For a good number of people reading this, yes — and that's part of what makes the design land.

Almost everyone has been on the wrong side of somebody's pen at least once, in some smaller family
argument that never made it into an address book. That's the same shelf that keeps [a set of keys
that no longer open anything in the house](/stories/keys-that-open-nothing) — an object
nobody throws away even once its use is gone. The shirt doesn't specify which side its wearer is
on, which is exactly why [a story with several honest and contradictory
versions](/stories/nobody-remembers-it-the-same-way) sits so close to this one.

## Isn't a scribbled-out name a cruel thing to print on a shirt?

It can read that way, and for some families it should stay in the address book rather than move
to a chest.

For others, printing it is closer to naming a thing that's already true in every conversation about
him — the family already treats his name as struck through; the shirt just says so once, plainly,
instead of every time indirectly. Which of those two a given family is in isn't something the
design can decide for you.

## Does it print well?

Yes — a single torn, over-inked line reproduces cleanly as long as the tear itself stays part of
the artwork.

The ruled feint lines and the two legible entries hold as flat black on a light oatmeal or bone
garment; the scribble prints best as one dense blue mass rather than individual visible strokes,
with the torn edge kept as a ragged, irregular gap rather than a clean cut — a straight-edged hole
would read as a printing error instead of damage.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the page at [JustOG](/) — the tab letter, the entries either side, and how the middle one
was removed. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's
made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Two entries, legible either side of a hole torn clean through the middle of the page.