Tattoo of a mauve awareness ribbon with the script words I'm the hero in this story, placed on the upper back.

Awareness ribbon with quote on back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

A mauve awareness ribbon with a frayed, torn lower end sits at the centre of the image, with black script on either side reading I'm the hero in this story. The ribbon is shaded in soft mauve and grey with dark outlines, while the lettering is solid black. The photograph is taken close up with a necklace visible at the top edge and denim at the bottom.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mauve silk came out of the chest in the ruined chapel of Carrow Keep the morning the south road reopened. Mother Hesketh had kept it folded since the winter the wolves came down from the fells and took the Abbot's mule, and she measured it against her forearm twice before cutting. Her grandson Wat watched from the doorway, sucking a crust, his boots still wet from the river.

Keep reading

"Who's it for?" he asked. "For whoever rides out," she said, "and for whoever stays behind to count the days. Hold still." She had sewn a ribbon for every man the keep had sent away, and she sewed them as a kind of argument with the stone, since the stone never answered back. The lower end she left unhemmed, because a clean edge, she said, was a lie a banner told.

Wat rode out on the grey gelding at noon, the ribbon knotted to his lance. At the broken portcullis the wind caught it and the silk tore clean down its length, the lower half streaming off like smoke. He twisted in the saddle, red in the face, and shouted that he would not be made a fool of. "Then tie what's left," his grandmother called. "I'm the hero in this story, Gran," he said, and laughed at himself, and went.

He came back in autumn with no lance and a limp, and the frayed end was still there on the gatepost, faded grey at its edges. The village children still walk under the arch to touch it for luck, and nobody has ever hemmed it. Wat says the tear is the best part.

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