Close up of a fine line black script tattoo reading 'you are enough' on the inside of a wrist, with a fist raised in the background.

Fine line script 'you are enough' on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is held in a loose fist, showing a small line of text on the inner wrist. The words 'you are enough' are written in a thin, joined cursive script in dark ink. The lettering is set diagonally along the wrist, against a blurred outdoor background of grass and leaves.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Text Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The printers on Kestrel Ring only know block capitals, so when the supply board sent down a request for a line of joined handwriting, for a label, it landed on my desk. I was the last clerk left who had learned loops from a paper ledger. Nobody reads cursive anymore. The lamps in the dormitory corridors dim at nine, and the hand-pads have no use for anything that does not fit on a screen.

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The request came with a scrap: four words scratched in pencil on the back of a ration chit from the year the ring was still a dock. Someone had written them small and slanted, the letters tied together so the pencil never lifted. You are enough. I copied them onto vellum three times before I trusted my hand. Old cursive runs downhill, and the tails of the letters drift toward the edge of the page, so the line looked as if it were leaning into a wind.

Idris, who runs the stores, watched me work and asked who the phrase was for. I told him it was for the label. He laughed and said that was the kind of answer a clerk gives. So I told him the truth: Mira Okafor-Lindqvist taught me loops in the dock school, and she died on the outer spoke during the second cold season. She never once said those words to me aloud. She wrote them, and I did not learn until now that she had meant them for anyone.

The vellum went down to the label printer in the morning. I kept the chit. Each night before the lamps go out, I trace the slant of those letters along my own wrist with a dry finger, and the joins follow exactly where her pencil went.