Black and grey photo of two inner wrists, one with the word past and the other with the word future, both in a simple serif lettering style.

Past and future lettering on wrists

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two wrists are shown side by side in a black and white photograph, with the word past on the left wrist and future on the right in a plain serif typeface. The linework is clean and even, with solid black letters and soft grey shading from the photograph. The composition is close and centred on the wrists, with a striped surface behind them.

Lettering Forearm Word Text Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell-founder at Corrow Hythe kept one rule: no name went onto a bell until the bell had rung. So when the Tallow twins came in one wet March asking for their names to be cast onto the wrist-plates of two iron cuffs, old Gervase set down his file and asked which of them would be the past. Maud laughed and said she would, being the elder by a quarter hour and always first into trouble. Edric only held out his hand for the second plate and waited.

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Gervase worked through the night beside the furnace, which roared like a sea wall. He cast both words in a plain Roman letter, because the Hythe folk trusted nothing fancy, then ground the edges until the cuffs sat close as a second skin. By dawn the twins had one cuff each, and they had quarrelled over which was which, and the quarrel had hardened into a silence that lasted three summers.

The spring the river rose over the lower town, the sluice wheel jammed at midnight, and only two people alive knew how to free it: a woman who had gone north to sell salt and a man who had never once left the water's edge. Edric sent the ferryboy to fetch his sister off the last barge. Maud came up the bank with her cuff rattling against the chain, and they took the wheel between them, one hauling the past back and one pushing the future forward, until the gate groaned open and the flood began, slowly, to fall.

Gervase, who lived to see it, said the bells never rang quite true after that night. The cuffs stayed on the Tallows until they were old, and nobody in Corrow Hythe ever again asked which of them was the past.