Black and white chart of stylised rune symbols, each paired with a handwritten label such as Agility, Heal, Love and Strength.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chart of labelled rune designs

Black and grey · Flash

A vertical chart of eighteen stylised black rune symbols arranged in two columns, each set beside a handwritten label in italic script. The symbols vary in linework, with some bold and angular, others looping and curved, and some fine and open. The plain white background and solid black ink give the sheet a high-contrast, stencil-like composition.

Rune Symbol Glyph Calligraphy

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow shut the pass the night the copyist came up the lane, and he pinned his sheet of symbols to the taproom beam before he fell asleep by the hearth with his boots still steaming. Nobody in the inn could read the shapes, but everybody could read the labels in his slanting hand: Agility, Heal, Soundless, Stealth, Voice of the Wind. Mrs Tolland asked for Balance for her bad knees. The ostler, who had been kicked by a grey mare the week before, asked for Frightened Speed and then laughed at himself for asking.

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I was the one left to mind the chart when the others went to bed. The rain-lamp guttered and the wind worked at the shutters, and I found myself tracing the curl of the one labelled Mourning with my finger, the way you touch a loose tooth. I took his pen and a scrap of tallow-stained paper to copy the lot before morning, and I got the Equilibrium stroke wrong, then the Precision cross, until my copy looked like a child's garden of weeds.

When he woke he took the paper from me and held it against the chart, squinting. He said the figures had never been the point, only the wanting that went into making them, and that a crooked copy was as honest as a straight one if the hand had meant it. Then he picked up his boots, which had dried stiff as bark, and went out to dig the path to the well.

By noon the drifts reached the sill. I stood at the door with the copy in my apron pocket and looked at the road, which had vanished under white. The last rune on the chart, Strength, was the one I had drawn most carelessly, and I left it that way.