Black script lettering reading Forgiven across the inner wrist, drawn in fine, even linework on pale skin.

Forgiven script tattoo on a wrist

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the single word Forgiven written in flowing cursive script across the inside of a wrist. The linework is thin, black and consistent, with looped joins and a slight upward slope from left to right. The ink is entirely black on a pale skin tone, and the word fills the centre of a plain, softly lit frame.

Lettering Fine line Other Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind only wants the good bits. You'll know the Skerrow ferry, the blue one that never sank, though God knows the sea tried often enough. Ruaridh Gunn ran her for forty winters, and in the inside pocket of his oilskin he kept a fare book, a black thing swollen with damp. Every crossing went in it, every bag of meal carried on credit, every pound a widow couldn't pay on the Saturday.

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Morag Beag was in that book for three pounds and a sack of barley, the year her man went over the side off the Sgeir rocks. She paid nothing. She said nothing either, which was worse. Ruaridh kept rowing out to her slip with the mail and never once asked for the money, and every time he saw her face close like a shutter, he wrote the debt again, a little larger, as if the ink could shame her into speaking.

Then came the gale that March, the one that took the Gunn boathouse roof clean off. Morag walked down to the slip with a storm lantern and found him bailing the ferry alone, hands raw, shouting for the boy who'd gone home sick. She stood on the wet stones and said the debt sat on her chest like a wet sack, and she'd sooner drown than carry it up the brae another winter. Ruaridh wiped his palms on his trousers, took out his pencil, and wrote one word in the margin in his best copperplate, looping the joins the way his mother taught him.

He tore nothing out. He just turned the book round so she could read it by the lantern. She read it twice, then laughed, the sort of laugh that comes up out of a body after a long fright. I never saw her owe a penny after that, and I never once asked her what the word had cost him. Mind your step on the slip, now. The tide's making.