Black line tattoo of a Punnett square grid with capital E and lowercase e letters on the inner wrist.

Punnett square tattoo on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A grid of four squares made of thin black outlines sits on the wrist, with letters E and e placed inside and around the squares. The linework is uniform and solid black, with no shading. The ink is set centrally on pale skin against a dark background of clothing.

Lettering Forearm Grid Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you. The bus will not move until the man in the glass box has finished his tea, and I have forty years of waiting in me, so I may as well tell you about the Haddow sisters, who crossed this line with one suitcase between them and a bread wrapper folded in the lining.

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Their mother kept hens on a hill farm above Kelso, and was as quiet as her hens. Their father mended nets in Eyemouth and laughed loud enough to hear over the surf. Folk in the village argued over which girl had what. So the old schoolmaster, who had once been to Edinburgh and thought himself clever, drew them a grid on the wrapper. Four small squares, two capital letters across the top, two small ones down the side. One letter from each parent, he said, and the boxes told you what was possible. Nothing more certain than that, and nothing less either.

Ada was the eldest and the loudest, and she counted the boxes with her finger. Three of the four held a capital letter, the loud one that wins over the other, so she declared herself a certainty and marched for the border with her chin up. Mary sat over the paper for an hour with the candle guttering. She found the one box with two small letters, said nothing about it, then folded the wrapper into a square the size of a stamp and pinned it inside her coat.

At the glass box the officer asked Ada her business, and she told him she was sure of everything. Mary told him nothing at all, and he waved her through, because quiet people rarely have anything to declare. Years later, when Ada's daughter asked which of them had been right, the old woman shrugged. The squares only ever tell you the odds, she said. It was Mary who had read them properly, and Mary who knew when to keep her hand in her coat.