Black and grey photo of two hands with the word FEMINIST tattooed in serif lettering, one letter per finger, with a partly visible outlined design on the back of the left hand.

FEMINIST lettering across fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are shown palm down, with the word FEMINIST tattooed in capital letters, one letter on each finger, and the letters F, E, M, I, N, I, S and T are spread across both hands. The letters use a shaded, condensed serif style with varying line weight and soft grey shading. Part of a black outlined design is visible on the back of the left hand, cropped at the top of the frame, and the image is in black and white with a plain background.

Lettering Hand Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the fire's the only warm thing in this cloister, so don't make me shout over the wind. This is the tale of Sister Agathe, who kept the ink-horn in the scriptorium of Saint Brannoc's, back when the abbot read every page the sisters copied and counted the letters on it like coins.

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Agathe was the best hand in three counties. She could make a capital look like a gate, a serif like a blade with the edge turned in. But the abbot would not let her write a word he had not first tasted, and there was one word she had carried in her mouth for twenty years that no vellum would take. So one winter she stopped trying to write it on the page and started writing it on herself. Eight letters, one to a finger, the same narrow cut she gave her saints, shaded thin on one side and thick on the other so the light fell on them like a cell door opening. F, E, M, I, N, I, S, T. She did the work at night with lampblack and a sewing needle for the points, and she did her sister Ysolde's hand the same way, because Ysolde had asked.

The abbot counted the letters on the Sunday and found nothing, which is a thing you can say about a word written on your own skin where nobody reads. Agathe's hands went up into her sleeves for the offices and came out again for the bread and the ink, and every time she reached for the salt the whole word went across the table with her.

Here is the bit I like. Years later a novice found the old abbot's ledger, and in the margin, in a hand as tight as wire, someone had written one line: the thumbs are blank, they are for holding the pen. So the girls who came after, when they were finally allowed to hold it, filled in the thumbs themselves. Now get to bed.