Two small black tattoos on inner wrists, a minus sign on the left wrist and a plus sign on the right, with palms held open.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Minus and plus signs on inner wrists

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two palms are held open towards the camera, each inner wrist bearing a small, simple black symbol. The left wrist has a minus sign and the right has a plus sign, both drawn in solid dark ink with even, crisp lines. Green sleeves, a wristwatch and a black beaded bracelet frame the wrists against a background of pale gravel.

Forearm Symbol Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell at Harrowmere had rung backwards for three days when Osk came down the causeway with a sack of salt on her shoulder and a grievance in her mouth. Nobody in the village could remember a bell going wrong. The old ferrywoman said it was the sea's doing, and the sea said nothing, which was its way.

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Every child born on the marsh was marked on the inside of the wrist before the first winter, one stroke for what the hands would take and one for what they would give. Ide had the cross, which meant generosity and little sense. Her cousin Morrow had the bar, which meant he counted everything twice and forgave nothing once. They had been close as two palms held open to catch rain, until the summer the salt pans flooded and Morrow kept the only boat.

Osk found them both at the drowned chapel, where the bell hung low in the water. Ide was trying to lift it with her bare hands. Morrow stood with his arms folded, watching the tide climb his shins. "It owes us," he said. "Let it drown with its debts."

Ide turned her palms up, the way the old ones taught, and Osk saw that the cross and the bar had begun to lean toward each other across the gap between their wrists, like two reeds in a current. Morrow looked at his own wrist for a long moment. Then he knelt in the brine beside his cousin and held his hands out flat, and the bell, which had never once been lifted by a single pair of hands, came up out of the water ringing true.