Small black lettering tattoo of four lines of abbreviated text on the inner forearm, beside a gold coin resting on the skin.

Four lines of small text on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black serif text tattoo on the inner forearm or wrist, set in four short lines of abbreviated words and punctuation. The lettering is crisp, with solid black ink and no colour, and it is placed to the right of a round gold coin resting on the skin. The background is dark blue fabric with a glossy surface, and the shot is lit from the side with some glare.

Lettering Forearm Text Lettering Coin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sister Agathe had kept the pattern tucked inside the back cover of the psalter for thirty winters, and nobody else in the house could read it. Four lines, pencilled in a hand that leaned like a fence in wind: pf on, kb on, then the rib turning over on itself, and at the bottom kf off, pb off, which meant the work was done and could be lifted from the needles. The bishop's clerk wanted the gloves for the ferry men at Saltmere by Candlemas, and he did not believe a nun could knit a cuff that would hold a wet rope.

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She cast on by lamplight with grey wool from the Harrow sheep, counting under her breath. Pf on, kb on. The needles clicked against the cold stone of the scriptorium while the brothers chanted in the chapel below. By the second night her fingers had found the turn without the paper, but the pattern kept asking the same question at the end of each row, the one she could not answer: why would a glove need to be taken up twice?

On the third night she finished the first glove and held it to the window, and then she understood the pencilled stars. Each one marked a stitch to be dropped and picked up in the opposite direction, so the cuff would fold back on itself and close like a fist. Whoever wrote the pattern had left a way for the glove to be worn and also unworn. She sat with it until the bell for matins, then took the needles out and began again from the top, because the second glove had to match the first stitch for stitch, and she had only one more winter in her hands.