Colour tattoo of four women's faces arranged like a monument above pine trees, with THANK YOU above and FOR BEING A FRIEND below, on the back.

Four portraits with thank you lettering

Back · Mixed · Photo

Four stylised female faces sit side by side in a row, shaded in pink and orange with black outlines, against a pale green background and small pine trees. Bold black lettering reading THANK YOU arcs across the top and FOR BEING A FRIEND curves along the bottom. The colour is soft and slightly washed out, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Back Portrait Face Tree Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Their names were Agnes, Mabel, Ruth and the youngest, Joan, though the valley only ever said them together, the way it said bread and salt. They came up the road the autumn the priory bell cracked, four women pulling one handcart, and asked the abbot for a roof in exchange for work. He gave them the old bakehouse at the edge of the pine wood, which had no door worth the name, and they hung a sack over the gap and got on with the baking.

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For thirty winters they fed the brothers and kept a lamp burning on the north path when snow came down past the trees. Nobody could say who began the habit of leaving a loaf on the wall at dusk for whoever was walking home late. Agnes said it was Ruth. Ruth said Mabel had started it. Joan, who remembered everything, said it was all four of them, and that ended the argument for another year.

When Mabel took the fever in the hard January, the other three sat with her in turns and sang the evening psalms badly, because none of them had the voice for it. On the last night she opened her eyes and told them they had been good to her, and that she had never once said so. Ruth laughed until she cried and said that was more than Mabel had managed in forty years of marriage to the miller.

In the spring the brothers cut a plank of pine and set it above the north gate. Joan painted the words on it herself, THANK YOU, and then after a long while she added the rest in smaller letters along the bottom. The rain has taken most of the paint now. The loaves still go on the wall at dusk, and the shepherds say that on still nights you can see four lamps moving under the trees, though only three women have ever been seen carrying them.