White rune-like symbols on a teal painted canvas, each labelled with a word such as Strength, Wisdom, Luck, Grace, Hope or Love.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rune-style symbols with word labels

Colour · Flash

A painted canvas shows twelve white, rune-like symbols arranged in four rows of three on a dark teal background. Each symbol has a small paper label beneath it reading a single word, including Strength, Wisdom, Luck, Grace, Music, Heart, Youth, Hope, Creation, Energy, Love and Genuine. The strokes are simple, angular and evenly weighted, and the layout is a neat grid with even spacing.

Rune Symbol Strength Music Heart Hope Love

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind up here takes half of what I say and gives back the wrong half. You want the story of the twelve stones on the Hollin Gap road? Then listen. Old Tobias Reeve had a chisel that rang like a bell when he struck it true, and the drovers paid him in salt and mutton to cut marks on the waystones, so a man caught in snow could find his way down by touch alone.

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The first winter he cut Strength and Wisdom, and the marks came out clean as frost. Then the pass took its toll. His daughter Ada could read where her father could only count, so she copied each word onto a strip of birch bark and tied it beneath the stone it belonged to, so travellers would know what each sign promised. Grace went up above the lip of the gorge. Music he cut on the bend where the wind sings through the rocks, so a man could hear the road was true.

Ada walked down to the valley in March with the last bark slip tucked in her coat, to fetch salt for the spring drovers. She did not come back up. Her father cut the final stone alone, the one labelled Genuine, and when he had finished he saw the eye-shaped mark sat exactly over the saddle of the pass, looking east and west at once, as though it had been watching him the whole time.

Walk the road with your eyes shut, if you dare, and count the stones with your hands. When your fingers find the one with the eye, stop and say her name aloud, because that is the only sign on this road that was never meant to point the way.