Black design on a gold background showing a rune above the word PARABATAI, surrounded by lettering of a verse, shown as a tattoo design in lettering style with no body placement visible.

Parabatai rune with verse lettering

Lettering · Colour · Flash

The design centres on a large black rune above the word PARABATAI in capital letters, with several lines of decorative script set around it. The rune and lettering are solid black ink on a smooth gold gradient that fades to brown at the bottom. The composition is symmetrical and text-heavy, with the verse lines staggered in a loose, centred arrangement.

Lettering Rune

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has been falling since the coach left you at the crossroads, and the innkeeper's wife keeps glancing at the two of you as if she is counting something. Aldis sits with his back to the fire, turning a cup of mulled cider between his palms. He has not taken off his gloves, and neither have you. Beneath the wool at your left wrist, the rune you both cut into your skin the summer you were sixteen has been aching for three days, the way it does before weather.

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Upstairs, a girl with a fever and no name coughs through the floorboards. She came in on the mail sledge at dusk, wrapped in a horse blanket, and she looked at Aldis's hands before she looked at anything else. Now he sets down his cup and says the thing you have been dreading since the pass. "If the road takes one of us, the other follows. You know that." You tell him you know it. You tell him you have always known it. He does not smile. He never does when he is about to be stubborn.

At first light the apothecary's cart has not come. The girl's bed is empty and the window stands open on a drift that has swallowed the sill. Two sets of prints lead out past the byre toward the black line of the pines, one long and one small, and the wind has not yet filled them in. Aldis's gloves lie folded on the table beside the cold cider, placed square to the edge where you could not fail to see them.

You pull off your own gloves. The air closes over the rune like a hand, and you go after him.