Black line drawing of a hand with a chain around the wrist, black-tipped nails and the words NEVER TALK in spaced capitals, a fine line tattoo design.

Hand with chain and NEVER TALK lettering

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a hand with a small chain link at the wrist and a closed fist with two extended fingers, each with black painted nails. The words NEVER TALK curve around the hand in spaced capitals, with small dot and dash accents and two black drops below the hand. The linework is clean and uniform on a plain white background, with solid black used only for the nails and drops.

Fine line Lettering Hand Chain Lettering Nail Fist Drop Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chain at my wrist was long enough to reach the clay bins and no further, which the steward had measured himself with a knotted cord before he sold me my contract. Every morning I carried the wet tablets from the kiln to the racks in the north room, and every morning he gave me the same instruction. Never talk. The rule was older than the palace, he said, older than the tablet houses, and a clerk who spoke to the ledgers would soon find her tongue in the furnace.

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I did not talk. I counted. Fourteen hundred and six jars of oil in the eastern store, forty-one bronze weights, the names of the ships that came into the harbour at Amnisos with their cargo of tin and their crews of widows. I scratched the numbers into soft clay with a reed, and when the reed snapped I used my nail, which I kept long and dark with soot so the men at the gate would take it for a mark of rank. Nobody reads a clerk's nails.

The autumn the river flooded, the steward came in holding a tablet I had never written. It listed my own name beside a sum I had never received. He held it up and said nothing, only waited for me to speak so he could beat me for it. I wiped my hands on my skirt. A drop of ink fell to the floor, then another from my thumb. I did not say a word. I raised two fingers, the way the potters signal across the yard, and pressed the wet clay against the lintel where anyone could see it.

By dusk the tablet was baked hard and the steward had gone to fetch someone who could read it. Let them. The chain still bit my wrist, but the words were in the fire now, and fire, as every kiln girl knows, keeps whatever it is given.