"Life is Beautiful" lettering on a forearm

She wanted a headstone for her husband, lost off the Skerry in February with his net still round his shoulders. Three words, she said, no more, because the island had enough long epitaphs and he had never liked them. Tormod asked which three. She had been turning them over since the funeral, she said, and could not choose between the sorrow and the other thing. "Cut me the other thing," he said. She laughed, the first time in months, and then she covered her mouth and kept laughing until it became something else. "Life is Beautiful," she said at last. "Small, mind. The gulls can't read."

He cut it in the flowing hand his master had taught him, letters joined like a length of good rope, each stroke tapering where the chisel lifted. It took four days. The chips fell into the marram grass and the children gathered them for kindling, and on the last evening Alasdair, the drowned man's nephew, carried the finished stone up the brae on his shoulder without being asked and set it down so the lettering faced the sea.

Tormod took his fee in a cheese and a jar of salt herring and went back on the Thursday boat. Months later a schoolteacher from the mainland, passing the point, wrote in her notebook that the graveyard above Ardnish had one stone with a sentence on it, that someone had planted a rowan beside it, and that the grass in front was worn flat where a woman sat each evening to read the words aloud to the water.