Close photo of a bold black Devanagari script tattoo running vertically along the inner forearm of a person in a grey sweater.

Devanagari script lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bold black Devanagari script word tattooed vertically along the inner forearm. The strokes are solid and even with a clean, dense black fill and a sharp, crisp edge. The arm fills the left and centre of the frame against a dark background, with a grey knit sweater and a tiled floor visible behind it.

Lettering Forearm Script Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you with the dust still on your boots, because the wind out here steals half of every sentence and I am too old to say things twice. Listen to what the well-keeper of Kharan did when the riders came over the ridge at noon.

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There were nine of them, on horses the colour of wet ash, and their leader carried the hooked knife that had opened three caravans on the salt road. The keeper, Dhiraj, was a thin man with a bucket in each hand. He did not drop them. He set them down on the warm stones, one and then the other, and he looked at that knife the way a man looks at weather coming.

"You want water," he said. "It is yours. The well has never asked who drinks."

The leader laughed and said water was not what he wanted. He wanted the keeper's son, who had been trading salt with the caravan folk and kept a bag of silver under his bed that the leader swore was stolen from him. Dhiraj did not reach for the rope or the iron bar leaning by the door. He drew a word in the dust with the toe of his sandal, a long upright stroke with curling marks hanging from it, and then he stepped aside to let the leader see it. The leader could not read it. He asked what it meant. "It means no one bleeds at this well today," said Dhiraj, "and that includes the man who comes with a knife."

The riders stayed three days, drinking and quarrelling among themselves. On the fourth morning the leader rode off alone, and nobody saw him go. The word was still in the dust, half filled by sand, but the wind had not yet taken it. Some say the leader returned years later with his face wrapped, asking to be shown the shape of that first mark. I was not there. I only know the well still runs.