Black and grey photo of the words Phil. 4:13 in thin handwritten-style lettering on the inner wrist.

Phil. 4:13 lettering on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a small tattoo reading Phil. 4:13 on the inner wrist, shown in a close crop with the hand at the top of the frame. The lettering is a slightly uneven, handwritten-style script in fine black linework with solid, even ink. The plain light skin and soft lighting keep the focus on the text.

Lettering Forearm Bible verse Scripture reference Number Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tamsin had forty trees in the Pell orchard and not one pair of hands to pick them, so when the thin boy from the mill road came asking for work at the end of August, she set him to the far rows without asking his name. He said his name was Owen. He said it twice, as if he expected her to doubt it.

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The ladder was the trouble. It was ash, older than the house, and its third rung had split. Owen would not climb it. He stood at the foot of the Bramley with his hands in his pockets and said he could not reach the top branches, and she said he could not reach them yet, which was a different thing. She wrote on the back of a seed packet in pencil, Phil. 4:13, and tucked it into the bark where the lichen grew thickest. "Read that when you're stuck," she said, "and then go up anyway."

He read it and went up. The first apple he dropped bruised. The second he caught. By the Friday he had filled eleven crates, and the ladder held because he had learned where to put his weight. Tamsin never said he had done well. She only counted the crates and wrote the number on the packet beneath the verse, in her square hand.

When the last of the fruit went down the lane on the cart, Owen went back for the packet and found it still wedged in the bark. Under the figures he saw a column of tallies, forty-odd years of them, one for every autumn she had worked alone. The oldest line was dated the year her husband died, and beside it, in the same faded pencil, she had written, Did it anyway.