Colour tattoo on an upper back in a traditional style, showing a sword through a red and orange ribbon knot with a green leaf, above and below lettering reading Duty is heavier than a mountain and

Quote, sword and ribbon on upper back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A vertical sword blade runs through a looped red and orange ribbon knot, with a small wheel-like shape and a green leaf sprig below it. Two lines of black blackletter-style lettering sit above and below the central motif, framing it. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills dominate, with soft shading on the ribbon, and the design is centred on the upper back.

Traditional Lettering Back Sword Ribbon Knot Wheel Leaf Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tamsin, the mill wheel has stopped again, so I have time to write properly, which you will find suspicious. Father says the river is as low as a Lent sermon. Captain Hollis came up from the garrison yesterday with his hat in his hands and the red ribbon from the colours folded in his pocket. He would not sit. He said Edmund had kept the standard all the way to the ford, and had carried it when the others dropped their muskets, and that the sword they gave him was for the hall, not for the field.

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I took the ribbon from him. It is faded at one end where the rain got in, and there is a knot tied in it that Edmund made the morning he left, the one he showed me on the back step. He said a knot like that holds whatever you ask of it and lets go when it should. I have tied it round the blade of his old sword and hung it on the peg by the door, beneath the wheel-spoke he carved for me when we were children. Mother asked why I would not put it in the chest.

Here is the thing I keep turning over. Edmund always said duty was the heaviest thing a man could lift, heavier than a millstone or a hill of wet sacks, and I laughed at him. Now I think he was only telling the truth from the wrong side. He carried it so well that the rest of us forgot it weighed anything at all. The rosemary in the window box is coming up green. I cut a sprig for his grave this morning and it smelled exactly as it did when he picked it for Sunday.

Come home at Michaelmas if the roads allow. Bring the good scissors, the ones that cut ribbon clean. I will be at the gate with the knot in my hand, waiting to see whether it still holds. Your sister, Anne.