Black and grey photograph of two hands holding pistols, with the Latin words Aequitas and Veritas tattooed in lettering across the fingers.

Latin lettering on fingers beside pistols

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows two gloved or bare hands gripping pistols against a plain pale background, with beaded bracelets on both wrists. The tattooed words AEQUITAS and VERITAS are written in serif-style capital lettering along the fingers, with fine shading on the skin. The high contrast monochrome composition places the handguns diagonally across the frame, drawing attention to the lettering.

Lettering Hand Pistol Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Caliche road had ever seen the two pistols put down at the same time, which was why the carters paid their dues at the wash station and never argued about the weights. Ruth Ansel kept the station after her father died, and she kept it with a ledger, a brass scale and a rule she had cut into the lintel: whatever is weighed is told true, and whatever is owed is paid in full.

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One dusty noon a man came up from the south with a wagon of salt and a gun in each hand, and said the scale was crooked. Ruth told him to set his own sack on it. He did, and the needle sat where it always sat. He said the ledger was forged. She opened it to the page and turned it round so he could read his own name in her hand, the entries running back to the year his salt first passed her gate. Nobody had ever held a pistol at her for longer than it took the kettle to boil.

He stood a long while in the heat. Then he lowered the left-hand gun, and then the right, and asked what she wanted for the truth. She said fairness, which was cheaper, and she charged him the toll like anyone else.

When the wagon had gone north, Ruth cut a second line beneath the first, shallow and square, so that any traveller who stopped in the shade of the lintel would know what the station was for.