Key and arrow script tattoos on forearms

Edmund Thorne kept the iron key to the mill gate, a clover-bowed thing with a bit cut square as a stair. His younger sister Maud kept the arrow, a goose-feathered shaft she had taken from a poacher's quiver the winter she turned twelve, and she carried it up the fells at dawn with the hounds. Their father liked to say a key and an arrow were the same promise told two ways: one locks what is yours, the other guards what is theirs.

The mill failed the spring the old man died. Creditors came with their papers and sour breath, and Edmund sat up nights over the ledgers. Maud noticed the pale patch on the wall where the sign had hung, the bailiffs' cart idling at the bridge, and the way her brother stopped meeting her eye at supper. She followed him one dusk through the gate he had sworn to keep locked, and found him at the millrace, tipping the last of the Thorne silver into a sack to pay for her place at the Carlisle school.

She did not shout. She laid the arrow on the wet stones, lifted the key from his coat, and turned it in a gate lock that no longer guarded anything. "You kept your promise," she said, "now let me keep mine." The two of them stood there until the race ran black and the lamp guttered out, and the old woman says the key is still on the nail in the kitchen, and nobody has ever dared take it down.