Quote lettering across lower back
Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo
A close photograph of a two-line quote in black cursive script tattooed on the lower back. The lettering has smooth, fine-to-medium lines with solid black fill and a slightly soft edge. The skin is shown in a tight crop with a brick wall at the top left and blue denim at the bottom.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The carters who crossed Harrow Gap in the years of the long snow said the pass had a memory and kept a tally on the rocks. Every traveller left a mark on the cairn at the summit: a pebble, a knot of wool, a scratch made with a nail. Most of the marks were small and soon forgotten.
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Ione Vell came over the gap in February with a cracked sledge runner and her brother's coat buttoned to the throat. The innkeeper at the foot of the north slope had told her the pass would take her name and keep it, the way it kept anyone who gave up on the far side. He said it kindly, the way men say things they have repeated for years. She asked him for a flat stone and a pin.
She scratched two lines into the grey slate of the cairn, one above the other, and went down the north side in the blowing dark without waiting to see whether the mountain would answer. Wolves trotted beside her for a mile, then lost interest. A shepherd's dog found her at dawn, and the shepherd found her a fire and a bowl of barley.
In spring the carters crossed the gap and read the slate. Some of them laughed. Others stood a while, and one old woman who had lost three sons to the drifts touched the letters with her thumb and walked on without a word. The innkeeper carried the stone down and set it in his hearth, where the lines still show when the ash is raked back.
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