Upper back tattoo of block lettering reading Clearly I have made some bad decisions, with red and black shading on the letters.

Block lettering quote across a back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

The photo shows a person's bare upper back, with the head and face turned away from the camera. Across the back is a tattoo of the words CLEARLY, I HAVE MADE, SOME BAD and DECISIONS set in large, bold block capitals over four lines. Each letter has heavy black outlines and bands of red and black shading, and the lighting is even with a plain indoor background.

Lettering Back Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agathe Brine kept the toll at Tollwick bridge, where the grey river ran under a span too narrow for two carts to pass. Above the gatepost hung a board her father had painted, the letters in fat block capitals and bands of red and black so the rain could not lift them. Every traveller had to read it aloud before the gate lifted. Most of them laughed. A few went pale.

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On a wet Tuesday in March a horse-dealer called Silas Rook came up the hill with a cart of bells he had not paid for. He read the board in a loud voice, CLEARLY I HAVE MADE SOME BAD DECISIONS, then tipped his hat and said it was the most honest thing he had seen all year. Agathe took his coins and his bells and said nothing, because the rule of the crossing was that the board told the truth and the keeper only counted.

Rook wanted to know why a board so full of confession hung at a toll, and she told him it was the only way her father had found to keep the bridge from falling down. Every man who read it had to admit something before he crossed, and the admitting slowed him enough to think. Rook laughed and drove on.

Years later, when her hands had grown too stiff to hold a brush, Agathe turned the board to face the other way. Travellers coming in saw only bare wood. Those going out read the letters from the far side, painted backwards in the same red and black, and found that someone had finally written the one thing the board had never said: you may go.