Four small colour tattoos of emblems, a blue water symbol, a green earth symbol, a grey air symbol and a red fire symbol, stacked vertically on a person's upper back.

Four nation emblems down the upper back

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A view from behind of a person with shoulder-length ginger hair, one hand resting flat against a plain cream wall. Four small tattoos sit in a vertical line down the upper back, each a simple emblem with bold dark outlines and flat fills. From top to bottom they are a blue circle with white swirls, a green trapezoid with a spiral, a grey three-swirl shape, and a red flame, with the colours shaded lightly and the composition kept centred on the spine.

Back Emblem Spiral Flame Wave Circle Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry at Hollin Ford had stopped running the week the river turned the colour of weak tea, so when Ada Brennock saw the salt-carter's mules stuck on the far bank, she went down with a rope and a lantern and no intention of being thanked for it.

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Four posts stood at the crossing, one for each gate the old ford-folk kept. The first was ringed in blue with white curls cut into it, for water, and whoever laid a hand there had to say what the river was owed. The second was a stepped green stone with a spiral carved on its face, for earth, and asked what the traveller carried that was not theirs to carry. The third bore three grey coils, for the wind, and wanted to know where the traveller meant to go once the crossing was done. The last was painted red and flamed at its crown. It asked nothing. It only waited, and the men who tried to bluff past it always came back shivering.

Osric Pell tried to bluff past all four. He told the blue post the river owed him a fee for the trouble of his mules. He told the green stone the salt was his by right of purchase. He told the grey coils he was going home, though he had no home he would name. At the red post he tried to say he carried nothing at all, and his voice gave out halfway through the word. Ada answered for him, quietly, the way she answered everything. The river owed nothing but mud. Carry only what a mule can bear. Go where the ground is firm. Then she held out the lantern, and the flame post grew warm under her palm, as it always did for anyone who had given something away.

The mules crossed before dawn. Osric paid her in salt, which she had no use for, and she tipped it into the current and watched it go. By morning the carter was gone, the lantern hung back on its hook, and the red post was still warm to the touch.