Thin black cursive lettering reading 'totus tuus' on a woman's forearm, held beside a white and blue wedding bouquet.

Cursive lettering on a forearm beside a bridal bouquet

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a white lace dress holds a bouquet of white roses, pale blue hydrangeas and green foliage, with her forearm visible. The words 'totus tuus' are inked along the forearm in a thin, cursive black script with even, clean linework and no shading. The soft-focus background of wooden pews and a stone floor keeps the focus on the arm and bouquet.

Lettering Forearm Script Word Bouquet Rose Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the fourteenth floor of Crossmere House, where the lift stuck between the sixth and seventh most afternoons, there lived a seamstress called Ivy Pell who wrote one letter a week and never posted it. She carried it down in her apron pocket, folded twice, and slid it through the brass grille of the lift, because that was the only door in the building that opened onto the dark.

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Everyone knew the letters went somewhere. The boy who swept the stairwell said the lift was a mouth and it swallowed the paper and kept it for the cold men under the car park. His mother said that was nonsense, the letters went to the river the way old things do. Ivy never said what she believed. She only wrote the same two words at the foot of each page, in a looping hand that leaned into the wind, totus tuus, and when the boy asked what they meant she said they meant she was all there, which was not a thing a boy of nine could argue with.

The winter her knees gave out she could no longer manage the stairs, and the lift was shut for six weeks while men in orange jackets stood about looking at cables. On the first Sunday it came back she found a reply pushed under her door. The paper was the colour of milk and the hand was so fine it looked drawn rather than written. It said the cold men had read every letter and kept them all in a drawer that smelled of cedar, and that they had never once been asked to answer.

Ivy folded the reply twice and tucked it in her apron. The next Sunday she wrote a longer letter than usual, took the lift down with it, and found the doors standing open at the bottom, with the car park lit up like a church for her.