Black ink tattoo of the words IT IS WELL WITH MY SOUL stacked above a small anchor on the inner forearm, shown beside a notebook with the same design written on the page.

Anchor and lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is raised toward the top of the frame, showing a tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist. The tattoo is the words IT IS WELL WITH MY SOUL set in stacked, hand-drawn block capitals, with a small anchor beneath in fine black linework. The open notebook on the right repeats the same wording and anchor, and the photograph is in colour with plain neutral surfaces.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferryman's daughter kept her father's oar under the bed the winter the river froze, because he had told her a boat is only as honest as the hand that steadies it. Every morning she went down to the landing and watched the ice for cracks, and every morning the old women of the village brought her bread and said the same thing: the water does not forget who went under it, but it does not hold them either.

Keep reading

In the spring the thaw came in a rush, brown and loud, and with it a stranger's cart rolled down the bank with a sack tied to the seat. Inside was a bundle of letters wrapped in oilcloth, all addressed to men who had crossed on her father's boat and never come back. She could not read them. The priest at the far shore could, and so she rowed across with the oar and the letters and sat in his kitchen while he read each one aloud, slowly, the way you would walk a child over stones.

The last letter was from her father. It said only that the crossing was rough, that he was not afraid, and that all was well with his soul. The priest asked if she wanted it read again. She shook her head and took the oar back across the water, and when she reached the landing she drove it into the mud at the edge of the bank, where the anchor-shaped iron ring he had hammered into the stone still held the boat fast.

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