Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mute speaker icon behind the ear

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid black tattoo of a speaker with a cross beside it, the symbol commonly used for muted sound, sits directly behind the ear. The shapes are filled in with no shading or fine detail, and the ink is a single dark tone. The photo is a close side view of the head and neck, with the ear and tattoo centred against darker hair and a grey top.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Piers came down from the fell in the second week of Lent with snow still in his beard and a sack of salt fish that the village would not let him carry further than the ford. The porter at Saint Oswin's had died at Candlemas, and the abbot had sent for whoever could hear the gate bell over the wind, which was Piers, because he could hear everything and had never once been believed about it.

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He had been born with ears that stayed open all night. As a boy he heard the ewes turning in the byre, the slates sliding off the north roof, and the abbot's rosary swinging against his knee three corridors away. The rule of silence was no trouble to him; it was the world that would not keep its rule. So the infirmarer, a practical woman from Kendal, took a stub of black sealing wax, pressed it into the shape of an old horn speaker she had seen on a printed notice, and drew a fine stroke across it. "That means nothing comes in," she said, and hung it on a cord at his throat where he could reach it with a thumb.

He wore it for thirty years. Visitors asked what it meant and he told them it was the sign for holy quiet, and they believed him, which pleased the abbot. The children in the valley copied it onto their slates and chalked it on their mothers' doors, and by the time the old bell cracked there was not a cottage between the ford and the moor without it.

On the morning of his burial the bell rang once, and a girl from the ford walked up the fell with a slate under her arm. She stood at the gatepost and drew the mark slowly, the horn and the stroke, so the wind would know she was listening.