Two inner wrists show matching black serif lettering reading home, one upright and one upside down, as a lettering tattoo on the wrist.

Matching home lettering on two wrists

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two inner wrists are shown side by side, each with the word home followed by a full stop in a thin black serif typeface. The left tattoo reads upright while the right is rotated, so the two read in opposite directions. The lettering is in black and grey against pale skin and white bedding, with soft natural light.

Lettering Forearm Home Word Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ishbel and Morag kept the light on Skerrin Rock the winter the old keeper drowned off the Ness. A tinker came over on the spring boat and offered to ink a word on their wrists in exchange for a week's fish. They chose home. He pricked it small and plain on the inside of each wrist, then turned Morag's hand over and wrote it again, so that when they laid their arms on the oilcloth, palm to palm, one of the words would read the right way for the other.

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For years they lived that way, the lamp turning above them and the kettle singing below. When the mainland boats brought word of fever, Morag went down to the jetty with a bag over her shoulder and her sleeves pushed up. Ishbel stayed at the lamp. She wound the weights every four hours, as the book said, and wrote the weather on a slate, wiping it clean each morning because nobody else on the rock could read her hand.

The fever kept Morag across the water through a whole season. In the second month a letter came with no words in it at all, only a wrist pressed in wet ink against the paper. The mark was backwards, and Ishbel had to turn the sheet over and hold it to the lamp before the word came right.

That night she trimmed the wick and left the door open to the wind, and when the first boat rounded the point she was already on the jetty with her arm held out, the word facing the sea.