Angular letters on the inner wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of four angular characters sits on the inner wrist, with the palm of the hand facing the camera. The linework is thin and even, drawn in single black strokes with no shading. The plain pale skin and soft, warm background keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Other Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and keep your backs off the window, for the wood hears a child breathing quicker than it hears a fox. You want to know why Ada Pardoe came home from the edge of Thornwick with a cut on her wrist and her hair gone grey at the temples? Then mind me. Her father was the stone-cutter at Coldharbour, and the boundary stone where the village ends and the trees begin had been his grandfather's work, a single line of rounded runes that nobody had troubled to read for forty years.

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That spring the brambles came. They crept over the path in the night, curling round the gatepost as if they were hunting for the latch, and the old oak at the fork leaned a little further every morning. Ada took her father's chisel and a pot of oak gall ink and went out before the dew was up. She didn't cut curves. Curves were the forest's own language, and she had heard what happens when you answer it in kind. She cut hard angles instead, a G that broke off at the corner, a flag, two strokes that met like a roof, and she marked the stone exactly where the bramble touched it.

The wood answered. Overnight a root rose out of the moss at her feet and bent itself into a shape she could almost recognise, and she understood it was her own name, written back at her in the forest's loops. So she did the only thing a cutter's daughter could do. She pressed her wrist flat against the cold stone and carved her own sign into the soft skin there, four sharp letters the forest could not spell, and she felt the wood draw its roots back like a hand from a hot kettle.

The bramble has stopped at that line ever since. Ada never wore a sleeve again, and when she was old she would hold her wrist up to any child who asked, so they'd know a straight mark is a fence. Mind the edge now. Off to bed, and don't count the angles.