Two clasped hands rest on sand, each wrist bearing a matching black script tattoo reading S'il plaît à Dieu.

Matching French script wrist tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are clasped together on sand, with a matching black script tattoo on each wrist. The cursive lettering reads S'il plaît à Dieu in slanted, smooth lines with solid black ink and no visible shading. The warm, muted photograph shows the ink standing out clearly against the skin, with the sand filling the background.

Lettering Forearm Script text Hand Wrist Sand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Oddin the salt-cutter's boy had never once promised anything without the words added after it. Every autumn he told his mother the nets would be mended by Friday, and every Friday he said it again, because in the kingdom of Harrowmere a promise with nothing added was counted a lie. So when Ilse, who kept the ferry at the mouth of the Vell, asked him to meet her on the far sandbank at the next low water, he said yes, s'il plaît à Dieu, and she laughed at him for being so careful.

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The custom in Harrowmere was to carry a promise on the body. A person who made a binding word had it pricked into the inside of the wrist by the old woman in the bone-house, with soot rubbed into the wound, so that the hand would remember what the mouth had said. Ilse's grandmother had done both of theirs the summer before, when the two of them swore to share the ferry and the salt pans, and the lettering was still dark and sharp on each of them.

The tide came in early that day, pushed by a wind from the north. Oddin walked out across the flats with the sand dragging at his boots and the water running in silver threads between the ridges. He found Ilse already on the last dry hump of the bank, knees drawn up, her hands clasped around them. The sandbank had shrunk to the size of a cart.

"You came," she said. "I thought the sea would have you first."

"If it pleased God," he said, and sat down beside her, and she held out her wrist for him to see the matching words before she took his hand. They waited there until the water dropped away again. When they walked back to the shore, the tide had smoothed the sand behind them, all but one patch where their two palms had pressed together and the damp grains had held the shape. Neither of them made a promise without the words after it for the rest of their lives.