Black fine line tattoo of the word lumos in handwritten script beside a four-pointed star on the inner wrist.

Lumos script and star on wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A handwritten word reading lumos sits on the inner wrist, with a small four-pointed star with radiating points placed to its right. The linework is thin and even in solid black ink, with no shading. The skin is pale and the plain dark sleeve at the bottom of the frame sets off the design.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Star Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning before the cage went down, Albert Pryce wrote one word on the board above the lamp racks in a hand like a fence post. He never explained them. Most were Latin, a few were Welsh, and the men read them the way they read the weather. The morning my brother Danny started his first shift, the word was lumos, and Albert drew a little star beside it with four points, the way a child draws a sun.

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Danny was seventeen and had not stopped shaking since the bus. He stood with his helmet in both hands while the rest of us signed the tally. 'It's just a word,' I said. 'It means light,' Albert said from behind the counter, not looking up. 'Lamp's only as good as the man holding it, mind. Keep your hand steady and the flame keeps steady.'

Down the drift the dark was thick enough to lean on. Danny's lamp guttered at the first junction and he made a sound I still hear sometimes. I put my hand over his, the way you'd steady a kettle, and turned the wick down to a blue bead. We walked the rest of the roadway counting roof bolts out loud, which Albert always said was the only prayer the pit had ever needed.

When we came up that evening, Danny took his lamp straight to the board and scratched the word into the brass with the tip of a nail. Under it he put a star with four points, uneven, but his. Albert ran his thumb over it and grunted. The next morning the board said nothing new, just the same word again, and beside it, in Albert's fence-post hand, a second star.