Black serif lettering of a chemical formula, C6470 H10012 N1726 O2013 S42, tattooed in a single line across the lower back.

Chemical formula lettering across the back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a single line of black serif text reading C6470 H10012 N1726 O2013 S42, with the element symbols set at normal height and the numbers as subscripts and superscripts. The linework is clean and even, with solid black ink and no shading. The line runs horizontally across the skin, with a white fabric edge visible at the top of the frame.

Lettering Back Text Serif lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The border post at Scarrow Pass had one rule, and the old guard repeated it to every traveller: say what you carry. Most people carried bread, bolts of cloth, or a goat with a bad temper. Tamsin Olwen carried nothing but a line of letters, and the line had been written on her back by a chemist in the valley, because the chemist said paper got wet and skin did not.

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The customs clerk, a thin man called Ibrahim Vell, asked her to turn around. He moved his lamp slowly along the line, the way a priest reads a psalm. Carbon, six thousand four hundred and seventy. Hydrogen, ten thousand and twelve. Nitrogen, seventeen hundred and twenty-six. At the sulphur he frowned. "Forty-two," he said. "A small number for such a large house."

She told him the formula was a key. On the far side of the mountain an apothecary kept one vial, and only a person who could recite the whole of it would be given what was inside. Vell had no vial and no apothecary, only a ledger with a cracked spine. He asked what the vial contained. She said she did not know. That was the point, she said, and he nodded as if this were an answer.

Then he told her the apothecary had died in the spring, and the vial had gone into the river with the body, as the old man had asked. Tamsin laughed, then stopped. Vell did not laugh. He opened his ledger and wrote the numbers down in his small square hand, one line under another. "Declared," he said. "Weight unknown." He let her go down the mountain with nothing to give anyone, and the only copy of the formula was in his book, which stayed in the post.