Gravestone reading Gender roles are dead

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold gravestone sits on a grassy mound, with the words GENDER ROLES ARE DEAD set in capitals across the stone. The linework is thick and dark, with hatched shading along the left edge of the stone and the top curve. The image is in black ink and greys, and the tattoo fills most of the frame on the arm.

Traditional Lettering Forearm Tombstone Text Slogan Grass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dougal Reid had cut letters for thirty years and never once been asked to carve a joke, so when Morag Kerr came up the cliff path with a folded paper and a flask, he set his chisel down on the bench. "Sixty-one years of rules," she said, "and every one of them painted on the lamp room door by men who never climbed the ladder in a gale." She wanted a small stone, the kind a family might buy, and she wanted it set above the boathouse where the harbour board could see it from their meeting room window.

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He drew it on the back of a tide table: a slab with a rounded top, sitting on a mound of grass, the lettering square and plain. He hatched the shadow down the left edge the way his old master had taught him, so the stone would look heavy even in the rain. Morag came out to the shed every afternoon with tea in a jam jar and watched him work. On the third day she read the words aloud as he cut them, one letter at a time, and he could hear her smiling before he looked up.

They set it on a Saturday. The board members came up in their good coats, and the oldest of them, Ewan Lyle, stood with his hat in both hands and read the stone twice. Then he gave a short surprised laugh, the sort a man makes when a gull lands on his shoulder, and said he supposed the ladder was hers now.

That night Morag climbed the tower with the spare key, lit the lamp, and left the door at the foot of the stairs propped open with a bucket so the wind could come up and read the words for itself.