Black ink handwritten lettering reading Be still on a plain white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Be still handwritten lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the words Be still written in loose, black, brush-style handwriting in the centre of a plain white page. The strokes vary in thickness, with a heavier, looped capital B and a slanted lowercase script for the rest of the phrase. The design is entirely black on white with no shading, colour or background detail.

Lettering Script Handwriting Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you with the wet boots, and mind the brazier before you tread on the cat. The old road from Sidon to the salt flats had a ferryman named Hakam, and he was the worst talker between the two rivers. Men paid him to keep quiet across the water, and they came back, which is more than could be said for the boatmen who flattered. So when a merchant's daughter came down to the landing with her brother shouting at her back, Hakam did not ask why. He pushed off, and the river took the boat as it always did.

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Halfway over, the brother began to weep and to curse the gods, and then the wind rose and the pole slipped from Hakam's hands twice. The girl sat very straight in the stern with a cloth bundle on her knees. She said nothing, and that was what made him look at her. Her hands were quite still, the way a heron stands in shallow water before it strikes. Hakam had lived long enough to know the difference between a frightened person and a waiting one, and he made a small noise in his throat that meant, in his language, the river is listening, so be still.

The brother quieted. The boat slid into the reeds, and the three of them waited while the storm went over them like a cart on a bridge. When the sky cleared, the girl unwrapped the bundle and gave Hakam a single coin pressed with a fish, and he took it without thanks, which she seemed to like.

Years later, on the far bank, a young woman stepped off a boat and pressed a copper into his palm without a word. Hakam looked at the fish on it, then at her, and said nothing at all, which was, as everyone who knew him agreed, the wisest thing he ever did.