Flash sheet of twenty black, angular rune-style symbols arranged in a grid, each with a printed label such as Love, Courage or Strength.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rune symbol flash sheet, twenty designs

Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of twenty black ink symbol designs arranged in a grid of four rows and five columns, each with a printed label above it such as Love, Courage and Strength. The symbols mix bold solid shapes with thin flowing strokes and angular, calligraphic forms. Everything is drawn in solid black on a white background, with no shading or colour.

Rune Symbol Love Courage Strength

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Imre had sold the same sheets for three winters, tracings lifted from his grandmother's ledger, and the rain had blurred the ink on half of them into soft grey smudges. He pinned the last dry one to the awning pole and watched a boy in a yellow cagoule stop in front of it, reading the captions under each mark with his lips moving. Strength. Stamina. Deflect.

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The boy asked which one stopped a bus from knocking you flat. Imre shook his head. The ledger said nothing about buses. It said Equilibrium was for keeping a deck level in a swell, and that anyone who carried it would know which way was down even in the dark. The boy pointed at the one like a folded zigzag, the line that looked as if it had been stepped on and got up again. He counted coins out of a sandwich bag onto the trestle, a damp five-pound note and some coppers, and came up twenty pence short.

Imre looked at the coins for a while, then at the boy's hands, red from the cold. Take Precision, he said. It costs nothing, and the ink is going anyway. The boy held the sheet up against the grey light, then traced the thin cross with one finger on the wet wood, pressing hard so the water beaded along the line. He thanked Imre in the careful way children thank adults they suspect of being kind, then ran off between the stalls towards the tram stop.

When the market began to thin, Imre gathered the spoiled sheets into a carrier bag. In a puddle where the boy had stood lay a single paper cross, folded once and pressed flat by a passing wheel, its black ink running out into the water in fine threads. Imre left it there. The rain would take what it wanted, the way it always did, and the boy had already put the good copy in his pocket, where it would stay dry.