Black ink line drawing of a four-line ribbon banner with hand-drawn lettering and hatched shading on the folds, shown as a flash design on textured paper.

Ribbon banner with four lines of lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a looping ribbon banner carrying four lines of hand-lettered capitals, set on a textured white paper background. The outlines are clean and even, and the folds and curls of the ribbon are shaded with diagonal hatching rather than solid fills. The composition is a vertical stack of ribbon sections that wind down the page, with the lettering centred on each band.

Lettering Banner Ribbon Scroll Lettering Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind comes over the col and takes the warmth out of a story if you let it. You'll have seen the ribbons tied to the cairn at Scarth Pass. Every one of them is a verdict, copied fair by Tomas Wray, who had the best hand in the valley and the worst luck with his lungs.

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The trial I'm telling you about was the spring the charcoal burners came down from the high woods. A girl named Nell Garside stood before the magistrate in Hollin Gate, accused of firing the tithe barn. Her father, grey as ash, pushed to the front and called her smoke. Second-hand smoke, he said, meaning she had breathed in everything he burned and carried it home on her coat. The old magistrate, Silas Dunning, had sentenced more sheep thieves than he had teeth, and he looked at her for a long time. She was so thin the draught from the door could have lifted her off the flags.

Tomas wrote it all down as they spoke, a line at a time. When Dunning gave his finding, he called for a ribbon. The charge would stand, he said, but the girl would stand trial for her sins in the sight of the valley every market day, and until then she would hold onto herself the best she could. Tomas tied the strip to the cairn that evening, and the wind took the ends of it straight out over the drop.

The rain got at the ink by midsummer, and the words ran until only the last line could be read. Nell still walks up here with her goats on market day. She stops at the cairn, and some say she reads that line aloud to the hills, slowly, the way you'd read it to someone who was not yet sure they could bear it.