Black and white photo of the words BE THE CHANGE in black lettering tattooed on the inner wrist, with beaded bracelets worn above and below it.

Be the change lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white close-up of a wrist with the words BE THE CHANGE set in two lines of plain, block-style capitals. The letters are solid black ink with clean edges and sit centrally across the inner wrist. Beaded and metal bracelets and a rope-like band frame the lettering, and the soft background is out of focus.

Lettering Forearm Wrist Lettering Text Bracelet Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Eight bells hung in the tower of St Aldo's, and the treble had a crack in its lip that Ada Penhallow swore made it sound sweeter than the rest. She said so again on Tuesday practice, while the ropes slid through the ringers' gloves and the sallies came down like wet washing. "Pull when the rope is at the top of its swing, not before," she called, "or you'll be ringing for yourself."

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Change ringing, she told the new lads, was never about strength. A method was a set of rules for swapping places, each bell moving one step at a time, and nobody was allowed to ring the same order twice. Tom kept dropping out of his place, rushing the backstroke like a boy late for school. Ada rapped her stick against the wall beneath the bell chart, where someone long dead had painted BE THE CHANGE in square white letters that flaked a little more each winter. "It's the only rule this tower has ever needed," she said.

In October her hands shook too badly for the rope, and the captain gave Tom the treble for the quarter peal on the feast of St Aldo. He stood in the wrong place for the first two rows and felt the whole ring lurch around him. Then he remembered the chart, counted his one step, and moved. The bells fell into their new order one after another, like a row of dominoes tipping the right way.

Afterwards Ada sat on the bench by the door, sucking a mint and listening to the church go quiet. "Hear that?" she said. The crack was still in the treble, but its note had moved, and now it sounded like something new.