Close-up of two black script lettering tattoos on the backs of the wrists, reading figlia on the left hand and madre on the right, with a silver bangle on the left wrist.

Figlia and madre script on the hands

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two hands turned towards the camera, each with a single word in black script lettering on the back of the wrist. The left hand reads figlia and the right reads madre, with bold, flowing strokes and some shading in the letterforms. A silver bangle sits on the left wrist, and the background is dark, with the skin tones and fine veins of the hands clearly visible.

Lettering Hand Script Lettering Word Hand Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta Ferrante had two words she would not let the priest say over her. The first was the one her mother called across the salt flats when the tide came in, a sound like a gull with a bell tied to it. The second was the one the old women of Sabbia Nera had given her mother the winter the Santa Lucia went down off the point: the word for the one left on the shore.

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Marta was nine that winter and small for her age. Her grandfather, who mended nets for the whole harbour, sat her on an upturned crate under the lamp and showed her how to draw letters with a sail needle dipped in lamp black. "Slow," he said. "The shape is the promise. The line is only the road." She practised on scraps of paper until the loops stopped wobbling, then on the back of her own hand, until he took the needle away and said that was enough ink for one child.

In spring she wrote the two words again, larger, on the lid of the tin where her mother's letters were kept. Every letter had been posted from a different port, and every one ended with the same line: keep the lamp lit. So she kept it lit. Each night she turned the wick high in the window above the net loft, and each morning she trimmed it and wiped the glass, and the boys on the quay started calling her the lighthouse keeper.

On the last spring tide, a woman in a borrowed oilskin came up the sand path with a sea bag on her shoulder and salt in her hair. Marta stood at the top of the steps and called the first word across the dunes, the gull-and-bell sound, and from the tideline her mother answered with the second. The lamp in the window burned down to nothing that night, and nobody thought to refill it.