Fine black script reading Walkworthy beside a watercolour style cross in red, green and orange on a forearm, with transfer stencils shown above.

Cross and script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black fine line script reads Walkworthy, with a dark cross overlapping the letters. The cross has soft watercolour style splashes of red, orange and green behind and around its arms. The top half of the image shows three matching stencil transfers on paper, and the lower half shows the finished tattoo on an arm against a plain background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Cross Script Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are three hours up the Scarrow Pass with a mule called Patience and a sack of letters for the high farms, and Patience has chosen this exact ledge to sit down. Nothing you say moves her. The sun has only now reached the far ridge, and the snow there takes the light the way wet paper takes ink, bleeding rose and then orange until the whole slope looks painted in a hurry.

Keep reading

Old Tobiah at the post office told you the road would wait for you if you let it. He was wrong about the mule but right about the road. You sit on a boulder and unfold the topmost letter, addressed in a hand you know to a widow called Mrs Arkwright at the last farm below the summit. It is short. It asks whether the black cross she painted on her barn door survived the winter, whether she still walks down to chapel on Sundays, and whether she has forgiven her son. In the margin, someone has written two words and underlined them twice: walk worthy.

You get Patience moving by singing, which is embarrassing and works. By noon the path runs under a rock arch furred with lichen, green and gold and a rust like dried blood, and the farms are closer than you thought. Mrs Arkwright meets you at the gate with flour on her hands. She reads the letter standing up, folds it, and looks past you at the barn, where the cross is faded but still there, its arms bleeding red and green into the grey boards like colour spilt on a wet page.

Inside the envelope, under your letter, is a second sheet in pencil with a single line: keep the pace the mule can keep. You laugh, and Patience, at last, lifts her head and walks on.