Black ink Chinese characters with English captions reading Sisters, Elder Sister and Younger Sister, shown as a lettering tattoo design sheet with no body placement.

Chinese characters for sisters, elder and younger

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows three pairs of black Chinese characters, each with a small English caption beneath it: Sisters, Elder Sister and Younger Sister. The brush-style strokes are solid black on a plain white background, with the characters centred in a vertical stack. The design is monochrome and simply composed, with no shading or additional imagery.

Lettering Chinese character Sister

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your stools closer, the lamp is nearly out and I will not tell this twice. Two sisters sailed out of Xiamen on the Tern in the year the tea prices broke. The elder, Mei Ling, had the steady brush hand, and she wrote the family name on every crate she loaded, because she had been taught that a thing without a name goes missing at sea.

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The younger, Yan, was the one who climbed the rigging. She was fourteen and fearless as a gull, and every morning she came down with a fresh bruise and a fresh lie about where she had been. Mei Ling never struck her. Instead she painted the two characters for elder sister on the inside of the hatch, and the two for younger sister on the rail beside the bell, so that whichever way Yan turned, she would be reading her sister's hand.

In the fortieth week, off the Cape, a squall took the topgallant and Yan with it. The mate swore she was gone. Mei Ling did not wait for the boat. She knelt on the wet deck with a pot of ink and wrote the word for sisters on every plank she could reach, one stroke and then another, until the spray ran the black into grey and her fingers bled from the cold.

Yan clung to the yard for three hours, and when the light came she could see only the rail, and the bell, and the crooked hatch. She followed the strokes down the ladder like a child following a path of breadcrumbs. The ink was long gone by morning, but the wood had drunk it, and to this day the grain of that deck shows the shape of two women standing side by side.