Two fine line black script tattoos, one reading amica mea on the upper back and one reading soror mea on the inner forearm.

Latin script words on back and forearm

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The top photograph shows a small black script phrase, amica mea, sitting on the upper back near the shoulder blade and neck. The lower photograph shows a larger black script phrase, soror mea, running along the inner forearm, with a metal chain visible at the left edge. Both pieces use thin, even linework in black ink with no shading or colour, set against plain, softly lit skin.

Fine line Lettering Back Forearm Script Lettering Latin text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Dunmere lock could remember a narrowboat carrying two women and no man, so when the Bramble came through in late October the keeper's wife wrote its name in the ledger with a question mark beside it. The elder woman, Mab Corrigan, steered with her hip against the tiller. The younger, Irene, walked the towpath ahead with a coil of rope over one shoulder and a grammar book open in her hand, reading the conjugations aloud to the horses.

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They had met at a convent school in Leeds, where the nuns made them copy verbs until their wrists ached. Mab kept the habit of calling Irene amica mea whenever she wanted something fetched, and Irene answered by calling her soror mea whenever Mab was wrong, which was most days. The lock-keeper's wife decided it was just how convent girls talked.

The winter they wintered at Hallam Basin the ice came early and froze the water in the kettle. Mab took a fever that settled in her chest. Irene sat up with her for three nights, reciting declensions by the stove, and on the fourth morning Mab told her to stop because the verbs were wrong and it was giving her a headache. Irene laughed until she had to go out on deck. When she came back, Mab had breathed onto the cabin window and written in the frost, in a wobbling hand, the word for friend, spelt with one letter missing.

In April they walked into a parlour in Hull, where a man with ink on his cuffs asked no questions and took their payment in coppers from the lock-keeper's own jar. Hester, watching from the gate as the Bramble went south again, saw the elder woman lift one hand from the tiller and the younger lift hers from the rope. They shouted something across the water that the engine swallowed. The keeper's wife never did write down what it was.