Black lettering tattoo reading Expecto Patronum across the inner wrist, in a serif and script style.

Expecto Patronum lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a single line of text tattooed on the inside of a wrist, reading Expecto Patronum. The letters mix upright and slanted forms with fine, even black outlines and solid fill. The skin is pale and the text is centred across the frame against a plain, slightly blurred background.

Lettering Forearm Phrase Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mist has come up off the moat again by the time you reach the gatehouse, and the stone steps are slick enough that you climb them on the sides of your boots. Your torch gives out before the second landing. You stand in the dark with rain dripping through the roof where the slates went in the winter gale, and you remember Mrs Ffrench at the village shop telling you the old lord's ghosts walk the curtain wall on Thursdays. It is Thursday.

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You feel foolish saying the words aloud, but nobody is there to hear them. Expecto patronum, you say, the way your grandfather taught you to say grace, quietly and holding the vowels. Nothing happens. The rain goes on. Then a pale shape slides out of the mist at the top of the stair, low and long-legged, its tail trailing light like a wick. It stops a yard from your boots as though it has been waiting for someone to ask properly.

It does not speak. It presses its narrow head against your knee, and the cold leaves your fingers all at once. You crouch, and by the time your eyes adjust you can see the thing is only a fox, a real one, thin and grey at the muzzle, that has been sheltering in the chapel since the spring. The light was never the castle's. It was just the fox's breath catching the wet air.

You walk down the steps with it trotting ahead, stopping at each bend to check you are still coming. At the bottom, where the path meets the road, it turns once and vanishes back into the mist, and you stand a while longer than you need to, holding the dead torch like it still might light.