Close-up of a black script tattoo reading Fearless with a purple awareness ribbon crossing the letters, in fine line lettering on skin.

Fearless script with purple awareness ribbon

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo reads Fearless in thin black cursive script, with the word Fear on the lower left and less rising to the upper right. A purple awareness ribbon sits over the join between the two halves of the word, shaded in lilac and violet tones. The photograph is a close, slightly angled view of the skin, with the lettering filling most of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Other Fearless Awareness ribbon Script Ribbon Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot wanted the banner lettered by Michaelmas, and he wanted the word split in two, so I spent three evenings with a reed pen working out how a single word could be made to stumble. FEAR went along the bottom of the vellum where its strokes could sit square. LESS I curled up and to the right, thin as a hair, climbing the margin like ivy off a wall. The infirmary had sent a stone pot of lilac, pressed from bilberries with a little alum, because the bishop's men had taken all the proper purple for their copes.

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Tobias, who was twelve and had been sent to grind my gall nuts, asked why the word would not sit still like the other banners. "Because it is hard to say," I told him. "Fear is a stone you sit on. Less is what you do when you get up." He did not understand, and I did not try to explain further, because I was not certain I understood it myself. I only knew the ribbon had to go exactly where the two halves met, or the word would simply fall apart.

I laid the ribbon over the join in three washes, letting each dry before the next, so the violet darkened at its folds and paled where the tails turned out toward the light. Up close the brushwork was ugly. From the chapel steps, where the abbot stood, it read cleanly.

On the morning of the feast the banner hung from the cloister arch. Tobias stood beneath it with his hands behind his back, reading slowly, lips moving over the broken word. Then he looked up at me and said it again, as if it were a question, and I found I had nothing to add except the ink, still a little tacky at the ribbon's edge, which I had not dared to touch.