Close-up of three stacked lines of the word busy in black lettering on the outer thigh, with a paperback book resting on the lap.

Busy repeated lettering on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Three lines of the word busy are set one above another in a plain, upright black sans serif on the outer thigh. The letters are solid black ink with clean edges and no shading, and the image is entirely black and grey. The composition is a close crop of the leg, with a floral skirt at the top edge and a paperback book held on the lap beside the tattoo.

Lettering Thigh Word Lettering Book

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Below the north wall of Harrowmere, where the roof had fallen in and nettles grew up through the hearth, lived a steward called Ada Penhallow who had never once in forty years been caught idle. Ask her, and she would tell you so. She carried the lord's keys, the mill tally and the tithe ledger. When anyone asked her to sweep the chapel or mend the eastern stair, she said only, "Busy, busy, busy," and kept walking.

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The hall was full of such answers. The cook was busy. The groom was busy. The rats, it was said, were busy too, and dug their tunnels under the cellar in shifts. Nobody could tell whether the work got done, but nobody could prove it hadn't, and the castle stood on in its crooked way because the word kept it standing, the way a stone keeps a wall.

One autumn a tinker came up the hill road with a sack of pans and a cracked kettle, and asked Ada to mend it. She said her three words and went on with the ledger. The tinker sat down on the mounting block to wait. The light went orange, then grey, then nothing, and still he sat. Ada, who had never in forty years sat down, found her knees aching and her feet heavy. At last she lowered herself onto the step beside him, just to rest.

In the night the north wall, which had leaned on nothing but Ada's busyness for longer than anyone remembered, slid quietly into the nettles. In the morning the tinker found her on the step with the kettle in her lap, and she had mended it at last, because there was nothing left to be busy about.