Black and grey tattoos of a robed figure and blackletter text on a thigh, with lettering on the fingers and stretching across the stomach above denim shorts.

Blackletter text and robed figure on thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a person in denim cut-off shorts and white lace underwear, with the face out of frame. A large black and grey tattoo of a robed figure sits on the outer thigh, beside vertical blackletter script running down the leg. Smaller blackletter lettering appears on the fingers and across the stomach, with stars and more script above the waistband. The linework is bold and solid, with grey shading in the robes and background.

Lettering Traditional Thigh Hand Other Star Lettering Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are asked to ring for the Ashworth wedding because Dennis Mollett's hands have gone, and the bride's father wants the old peal rather than the recording from the council. The tower smells of wet rope and pigeon. High on the north wall someone has painted a robed saint, cloak gathered at the knee, one foot planted on a grey shape that might once have been a dragon. Beneath him runs a line of black letter, the paint furred with age. You have read it every Sunday of your childhood and never once finished it.

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The party arrives at two. You hear them before you see them: heels on the lych-gate flags, a car door, laughter pitched a little too high. The bride is Lucy Ashworth, who once stole communion wine from the vestry while you stood guard, and she glances up at the tower through the open porch and smiles as if she knows you are there. You pull the tenor rope until your palms sting. Each stroke shivers the timbers, and dust drifts onto the saint's upturned face like flour.

When the service begins you climb to the parapet to watch the lane. The groom's brother is walking up from the Crown with a folded paper in his jacket pocket. You know what it says, because you wrote it three years ago in a hand nobody in the village would connect with you: a ledger of who owed whom and what had been promised. Halfway up the path he stops, looks at the church, and turns back towards the pub without a word to anyone.

You stay up there until the bells are quiet, then go down to the vestry, where the register lies open with a pen beside it. You sign your name in the same careful hand, and the ink takes long enough to dry that you have time to read the line on the wall one more time. Hard, the old letters say, and then the rest has flaked away. You close the book and leave the saint to keep the nave.