Bold black Devanagari lettering reading prana above the transliteration and the English words Breath, Energy, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Prana lettering in Devanagari script

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the Sanskrit word for breath or life force written in bold black Devanagari script, with a horizontal headline bar across the top of the letters. Below it, the romanised word Prāṇā and the English translation Breath, Energy are set in a heavy slab serif typeface. The design is solid black on a plain white background, with no shading and a centred, symmetrical layout.

Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mortar had been mixed for three hours when Hester finally put down her trowel and said what everyone on the scaffold had been thinking. The east wall of Carrick Ness was not falling. It was breathing, and the county wanted the gaps stopped before winter.

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Old Dilys Penhallow, who had kept the keys to the ruin since her husband drowned off the point, sat on the bottom step with a slate across her knees. On it, in chalk she renewed every spring, was a word her mother had copied onto the flyleaf of a prayer book years ago, when she came home from India. Prāṇā. Her mother had said it meant breath, and that everything with a life in it had one. "Stop the gaps," Dilys said, "and you'll stop the sea singing in the hall. Then see who comes back."

Hester worked through the morning with the wind moaning through the arrow slits and the great hall drawing in and letting out its cold. At noon she packed the last opening, a slot beside the chapel where the gale always made its loudest note. The silence came down so fast her ears rang. Far off, the gulls sounded like they were calling from another county. That evening she went back alone with a bar and dug the mortar out again, one crumb at a time.

By the time the tide turned she had cleared the slot to bare stone. The wind came up the cliff in the dark, filled the hall with its low grey note, and drifted out through the roofless sky. Hester stood in the gap with the salt on her lips and breathed with it, in and out, until the sound felt less like the castle's and more like her own.