Black blackwork infinity symbol tattoo on a forearm, with the words ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE written through the loop in handwritten capitals.

Infinity symbol with lettering on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black infinity symbol sits across the forearm, with a solid abstract shape with sharp points on its left side. The words ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE run through the centre of the loop in uneven hand-lettered capitals. The ink is all black on pale skin, with bold, solid fills and a bathroom floor and wall visible in the blurred background.

Blackwork Lettering Forearm Infinity Lettering Text Abstract shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every winter the frost came down on Hollin Farm before the milk was in, and every winter Mabry Coe went out to break the trough ice with the back of a spade. The ice always cracked in the same long curve, like the mark a thumb leaves in wet clay. She did not think much about it until the year the crow came.

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It sat on the gatepost with its head tilted, a black bird with a hooked beak and a notch torn in one wing, and it watched her work without a sound. On the third morning she said, "You've been here before," and the crow opened its beak and spoke her name in her dead mother's voice. She dropped the spade in the slush and did not pick it up for a long time.

The crow told her, in the way crows tell things, that the year folded back on itself each midwinter. Every thaw she had ever known was the same thaw. The lambs came, the brook rose, the hay caught fire in the barn in August, and then the frost came again and found her at the trough. She went into the barn and dragged out the old almanac, and in its margins, in her own cramped hand, were notes for seasons she had not yet lived.

She took the pencil from the string around her neck and wrote beneath them the one thing the crow had not said. Then she went out to the trough and broke the ice as she always had, letting the crack run its long curve. This time she left the largest piece floating, and the crow lifted off the gatepost and came down beside it, and the two of them watched the water settle back toward the cold.