Chart of runic-style symbols and labels
Mixed · Flash
A sheet of many black line symbols arranged in a grid across a white background, including hearts, circles, diamonds, vertical staves and angular glyphs. Each symbol has a short printed label, and most of the drawings use thin single-weight linework with some hatching and cross marks. A few symbols have small touches of blue, purple and brown, while the rest are black on white.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The rain had been coming sideways off the canal since eight, so nobody stopped at my trestle except to shelter under the awning and pretend to look at the brass hinges. Then a woman in a yellow mac lifted the laminated sheet of symbols from the box and held it to the light like a banknote she suspected of being forged.
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"Who drew these?" she asked. "A printer in Hebden, I think, back when a photocopier was the only magic anyone could afford," I said. She ran a finger over a glyph shaped like a snapped branch. "To lock," she read. "Does it work?" "Depends what you're keeping in." She laughed, paid me four pounds, and folded the sheet into her bag with the care you'd give a letter.
Three weeks later she came back in the rain, the paper gone soft at the corners. "I used the one that says to see the way clearly," she said. "Stood in the lock-up at two in the morning with a torch and found the spare key my dad hid in a tin of paraffin in 1987. None of it was magic. The little arrow just made me look at the right shelf." She bought a socket set and asked if I had any more of the sheets. I didn't, but I pinned my own copy above the till, and it's still there, and every wet Saturday somebody asks me what it's for, and I tell them it's for looking.
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