Two forearms side by side with matching tattoos of a red circle, green triangle, orange square and black square, with the words In spite of everything, plus a zodiac symbol on the left arm.

Matching forearm tattoos with shapes and a quote

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each carrying a row of simple geometric shapes in red, green, orange and black. The words IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING appear in black block capitals beneath the shapes, with the left forearm's text rotated along the arm. A small black zodiac-style symbol sits above the shapes on the left arm, and the lines are bold and even with flat colour and no shading.

Lettering Geometric Forearm Geometric shape Circle Triangle Square Quote Lettering Zodiac symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the river crossing of Hobb's Ford, the toll-keeper Maren Tull kept four wooden stamps in a tin box: a black square, a green triangle, a red circle, and a little orange shape that nobody in the valley could name. Each traveller who paid was pressed with one of them, and the stamp told the bridge-guard which road they might take. The rule was simple. Anyone who came over the water with a stamp could go on, and anyone without one went back the way they had come.

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In the wet spring a boy came down from the hills with no coin and no stamp, only a folded letter for his mother, who lived across the water in the mill town. The guards wanted him sent back. Maren looked at him a long time. Then she took the square from the tin, then the triangle, then the circle, then the orange one, and pressed all four onto the back of his hand in a row, the way you might mark a parcel that had a long way to go. "Those are the four things you carry," she said. "On the far bank they will ask who sent you. Hold up your hand and say the words that go under them, and you will be let through."

He crossed. On the far side a clerk with ink on his cuffs turned the marks over, frowned, and reached for the gate bar. The boy held up his hand and said the words, slowly, the way he had been taught: in spite of everything. The clerk looked at the letter, then at the boy, and lifted the bar.

The boy reached his mother's door before dark, the letter still dry inside his coat, and the four marks on his hand had not yet faded when she opened it.