Close-up of black script lettering reading "It's called Vitiligo." on a forearm, with lighter depigmented skin patches visible around the tattoo.

"It's called Vitiligo" script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm shows the words "It's called Vitiligo." in black cursive script running diagonally across the skin. The lines are smooth and even with solid black ink and no shading or colour. The skin shows lighter, depigmented patches, and the photo is taken indoors against a bright background with the arm angled across the frame.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrowmere had a word for the pale stain that crept across the water meadows that spring, so the Lord Chancellor sent for me, being the only clerk in the kingdom who could spell 'bramble' twice in one sentence without looking. I rode out with my ink-horn strapped to the saddle and a bad-tempered mare called Patience. The grass there had given up its colour in patches, grey-white as old linen, and the shepherds crossed themselves when they saw me coming, as if I might catch something from the clerk's robe.

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An old washerwoman named Nan Idle met me at the ford with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and a pail of lye at her feet. She looked at my writing case and then at the meadow, and she shook her head. 'You'll want a name for it, will you? Write it down plain, clerk. It's called what it is. Everything else is the shepherds' business and the priest's.' I asked her what it was, precisely, so that the record would be correct. She laughed at me, not unkindly. 'Something that's there. That's all a thing needs to be to have a name.'

I sat on a stone by the ford and wrote it in the chronicle while the mare cropped the pale grass. I wrote the words slowly, in the good hand the Chancellor paid for, and every letter came out dark and even against the page. When I looked up the stain had not moved, and neither had Nan Idle, who was already wringing out a sheet over the water and humming something with no tune at all.

By midsummer the meadows had begun to green again at the edges, the way they do after a hard winter. The chronicle still reads as I left it, the ink gone black and sure of itself, and I have never once been able to make myself cross out a word of it.