Black lettering tattoo on a forearm reading (500) This is not a love story. This is a story about love, in a script and serif style.

Quote lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with black text tattooed across it. The top line reads (500) in bold serif capitals, followed by the lines This is not a love story and This is a story about love in a flowing script, with the edges of the lettering cropped by the frame. The ink is solid black on pale skin against a dark background, and the text runs horizontally across the middle of the image.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Love

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had copied four hundred and ninety-nine leaves before the abbot noticed the ink was running thin, and he sent a boy down to Hallow Ford for more vellum. It came rolled in oilcloth and smelling of the cart. Osric laid it flat under the north window and pricked the margins with his awl, the way his master had taught him, so the lines would run true.

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The book was a collection of saints' lives, dull as wet bread, and the abbot wanted it finished by Lent. But Osric had a habit he never confessed to. At the end of every quire he wrote a small thing where no one would look. A sweeper named Tam, who had no letters, would stand on an upturned bucket in the cold cellar and sound out the words while Osric pretended not to notice.

On the five hundredth leaf Osric wrote the number in red ink, neat as a bishop's seal, and under it the thing he had been circling all winter. This is not a love story. This is a story about love. Tam asked him what it meant. Osric said it meant the kind of love that counts pages and keeps its hands busy, and that a man could be too proud to say the name of the person he was counting for.

When the book went up to the abbot, he turned to the last leaf, read it twice, and laughed until he had to sit down. He left the note in the binding. Years later the monks found a second line beneath it in a rough, careful hand, copied letter by letter by the sweeper, who had got every word of it right on his first try.