Two matching black script tattoos reading Anam Cara, one on the top of each foot, shown in lettering style on bare feet against dark rock.

Matching script lettering on two feet

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet, one tattoo on each, show the same black script lettering reading Anam Cara across the top of the foot. The letters have bold, flowing strokes with a slight slant, and the two designs are identical in size and shape. The ink is solid black with no colour, and the feet rest on dark wet rock in bright daylight, with painted toenails visible on both feet.

Lettering Other Script Lettering Feet Matching tattoo Toenails

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, for the tide's making and I've only the one breath left for this part. Nell Corrigan and Brídín Hayes were fourteen the summer they found the stone at the foot of Dunmore slip, a flat grey thing with two words scratched into it by someone long dead. Anam cara, the priest said when they showed him. Soul friend. He said it as if it were a loaf a person could be handed across a counter.

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They didn't believe him, not then. They took turns carrying the stone up the cliff path in a coat pocket, and each swore the other would never leave the town while it was in her keeping. Brídín went to Liverpool at nineteen on the Thursday boat with a cardboard case and no coat, because she'd given her coat to a fisherman's child in February. Nell stayed and sold mackerel off a barrow and kept the stone on the windowsill where the gulls could see it.

Forty years on, a letter came with two stamps on it and inside was a second flat stone, the twin of the first, wrapped in a page of the Liverpool Echo. Brídín had found it on the docks and carried it about for decades without knowing why. Nell laid the pair together on the kitchen table and they fitted like a pair of boots, the edges worn to the same curve by the same water.

She walked them both down to the slipway on the next low water and set them side by side at the tideline. The sea came in and took them within the hour, and neither woman minded, because a soul friend is not a thing you keep in your pocket. Mind the weed now. Off you go.