Fine black cursive script tattoo reading balance runs down a person's forearm, with a white shirt sleeve and a white rose in the frame.

Balance script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with the word balance written in slim, flowing black script running vertically along the arm. The linework is thin and even, with the ink appearing solid and crisp against the skin tone. The background is softly blurred, with a white shirt sleeve, a pale rose and a hand holding the arm.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the stove, you, and mind the kettle, because this is a story about carrying water and I will not have you spill my tea doing it. Winter on Hollin Farm was a hard season. The yard froze so hard that the hens slid across it like pennies, and the only thing between the house and the well was a path of ice that Tom Ashby walked twice a day with a yoke across his shoulders.

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The yoke held two pails, and the pails were never empty. Old Mrs Pardoe, who kept the dairy, told him that a man who wanted to stand still on ice had to be always moving a little, the way a heron does in a shallow stream. 'Balance is not holding on,' she said, banging the churn lid. 'It's a hundred small mistakes put right before anyone sees them.' Tom thought this was nonsense, mostly because his boots were wrong and his feet were cold, and because he was seventeen and believed a man either stood or fell.

Then came the morning the thaw made the path glassy, the well rope snapped, and he went down on one knee with both pails tipping. He did not spill them. Something in his hips shifted without asking him, the way a cat's tail goes out for a fence rail, and he rose with water slopping at the rims and not a drop lost. He stood there, astonished, until the water stopped moving.

That evening he wrote the word on the frosted pane of the back window with his finger, the letters running down the glass in a long slanting line. Mrs Pardoe read it from the doorway and laughed. 'There,' she said. 'You've made a word that doesn't know which way is up.' By morning the frost had taken it back, but the shape of it stayed in the glass for anyone who knew where to look.