Black ink tattoo on a thigh with a handwritten-style quote about battle scars, framed by two angular outlined hearts.

Quote and outlined hearts on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo on the side of a thigh shows a handwritten-style quote in the centre, reading 'to not have some battle scars is to never have lived' across six lines. Two bold, angular outlined hearts sit above and below the text, with clean black linework and no shading. The ink is black only, and the composition is centred and vertical on the skin.

Thigh Heart Quote Handwriting Text Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has taken the wax seal from you before you have finished the sentence, and he turns the copied page to the window as if the light might reveal a fault in it. You had written the line in the margin of the Rule because the abbot would not let you write it anywhere else: to not have some battle scars is to never have lived. He reads it twice, lips moving. "That is not in Benedict," he says.

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No, it is not. It came to you in the infirmary last winter, from a carter's son who had come off his cart and split his scalp on a stone, and who laughed at the stitches while the blood ran into his collar. You wanted to put it somewhere that would outlast his laughter. So you drew two hearts above and below the words, the way you were taught to mark the ends of a psalm, angular and heavy, because the brothers who taught you had hands like hammers and never trusted a curve.

Anselm sets the page down. Outside, the bell for None begins, and you wait for the nine strokes, as you always do, before he speaks again. "The abbot will have it scraped," he says. "Or he will keep it. I am not sure which would be the greater penance."

That evening you go to the scriptorium with a fresh sheet and a pen cut too sharp. The quote will not go in the book. It goes instead onto the inside of the cupboard door where the ink pots sit, small enough that only the one who opens it each morning will see it, and you find, to your surprise, that the letters come out steadier than any you have written in months.