Woman in a pale blue collared shirt wearing a cream pin that reads LEAVE ME ALONE, with black linework tattoos on her upper arm.

Fine black tattoos on an upper arm beside a pin

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop shows a woman from the chin down wearing a pale blue Peter Pan collar shirt with a cream fabric pin on the chest that reads LEAVE ME ALONE in black capitals. Thin black tattoo lines and lettering run down the outer upper arm on the right side of the frame, though the marks are only partly visible. The image has a soft, neutral palette of blue, white and cream with black ink.

Upper arm Pin Badge Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the Salt Bridge crossing, the toll-keeper Mattias Orr had kept the ledger for thirty winters, and he knew every face that came over the water. So when the woman in the grey coat stepped up without a bundle, only a strip of cream linen pinned to her coat, he read the words before he read her papers. Black thread, careful capitals: LEAVE ME ALONE.

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He asked her, as the rules required, what she carried. She said nothing, which was the first answer he had ever found honest. The guard behind him laughed and reached for the cloth, but Mattias lifted a hand. The custom in the valley was older than the bridge: a person who wore their wish openly could not be questioned about it. Nobody had ever tested the rule. Nobody much wanted to.

She crossed. Over the following seasons the story travelled faster than the carts. Traders began stitching their own scraps of linen, and by the time the orchard frost came, the crossing was full of pinned sayings: GO AWAY, NOT TODAY, MY OWN BUSINESS. Mattias noticed the officers grew quieter, and the bridge grew kinder, because a stranger who has been refused a question learns to ask for less.

Years later a girl came to him with a pin of her own and asked what the first woman had been hiding. Mattias turned the ledger to the page where her name was written, and in the column for remarks he had never written anything. "Her business," he said, and wrote only the date.