Framed white print of a dark blue Ogham-style vertical mark with the words Neart and Strength beneath it, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Ogham strength design in a frame

Colour · Flash

A dark blue vertical stem with angled strokes branching from it, drawn on a plain white card. The words Neart and Strength sit centred below in a simple serif-style lettering. The design is centred within a white mat and a black frame, with even margins and soft, even lighting.

Strength Script Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stone had split down its middle in the frost, and Old Tadhg said that was no reason to leave it lying in the nettles. He set the mallet in my hand and tapped the blade against the grey spine of it. 'A stem first,' he said. 'Everything in ogham hangs off a single line, the way a family hangs off one name.'

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I cut the stem over three evenings, with the lamp hung from a nail in the wall of the mason's shed and rain drumming on the tin roof. Tadhg wouldn't let me touch the strokes until the spine was true. Then he showed me the branches, five cuts leaning off the edge, and the word they spelt, which was neart. He said it meant strength, though the old people of the parish used it more for the strength to get out of bed on a wet morning than for anything that could lift a horse.

The strokes were the hard part. Each one had to match the depth of the last or the whole word would read crooked, and my hand kept tiring on the fourth. Tadhg sat on an upturned bucket, smoked, and said nothing for an hour, which was his way of teaching. When I finally blew the dust off the last cut, the stone looked like a tree stripped of its leaves in winter, waiting quite calmly for spring.

We set it up at the crossroads the week after, where the lorry drivers slow for the bend. Tadhg died in March, and nobody asked me to cut his name. Still, every time I pass that stone I run my thumb down the stem and count the strokes, the way he counted aloud while I worked, as if to prove the thing could still be done.