Geometric arm tattoos with a fringed leather hip bag

The guard at Sallow Bridge turned out my pack twice and still missed the reason I was carrying it. Under the bread and the spare boots, I had three cloth bags of meadow fescue sewn into the lining of the fringed hip bag, the one Mam cut from the old saddle leather. Every triangle I have inked this past month is a row count from the field at Orlen. Circles mark the wells, dots mark the stakes. The guard counted the lines of pattern on the flap, saw only decoration, and waved me through, because a pattern is harmless to a man who cannot read one.

Crossing the grass on the far side took two days. It stood taller than a man in places, seed heads nodding like hats in a crowd. I walked the ridge the way Grandfather taught us, counting steps in threes and pressing a thumbnail into the leather every hundred. The fringe kept snagging the stalks and shedding little cream threads behind me, so anyone following would have found a trail through the field like breadcrumbs. I decided to let them.

At Orlen, Maud Tiller met me at the gate with her sleeves rolled and a jug of cold tea. She did not ask what was in the bag. She only asked whether the triangles pointed north. They did. She said her husband had sown that same pattern before the border moved, and the grass had never once come up crooked.

Tell Mam the seed is safe and the field is ours again. I will be home by the first frost, and I will bring back the tea jug, which I am fairly sure Maud has been meaning to ask for.

Yours, Ruth