Vertical list of grey rune designs, each under a typewriter-style label such as Iratze, Speed, Parabatai and Clairvoyant Sight, under a Runes heading.

Rune tattoo designs with labels

Black and grey · Flash

A vertical sheet of nine rune-style symbols, each set above or below a typewriter-style word: Iratze, Strenght, Speed, Fearless, Angelic Power, Block, Parabatai and Clairvoyant Sight, with a Runes heading. The symbols are drawn with smooth, tapering grey strokes on a white background, with the labels in black, slightly distressed type. The composition is centred and evenly spaced, with no skin or body placement shown.

Rune Strength Fearless

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ivy came away from the gatehouse in wet ropes, and Maud Tennant worked it loose with a flat chisel and her bad knee on a folded sack. Behind it, cut into the pale ashlar at the height of a standing man's shoulder, were marks no mason of the Border would have bothered with: slender strokes that swelled and thinned like a pen lifted and pressed again. Nine of them, in a column, each with a few letters chiselled beneath in a thin, impatient hand.

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The letters were words, which surprised her more than the shapes did. Iratze. Speed. Fearless. Clairvoyant Sight. Her grandfather had kept a cardboard box of such things, but these were older, the lettering crowded to one side as if whoever cut it had run short of wall. She copied them into her notebook, drawing each curl as carefully as she could, and when she came to the fourth she noticed that the stone around it was polished, worn smooth by a thumb.

The estate office had sent her to log the gatehouse before the council's contractors arrived with their diggers. The clerk, a young man named Dai Pryce, had laughed when she mentioned the carvings. "Some lad from the village, I expect, after the sheep books were done." But beneath the ninth, Clairvoyant Sight, someone had scraped a space the width of a hand and left it bare, and the mortar there was newer than the rest. She ran her palm over it and felt a faint ridge, as though a name had once been cut and then planed away.

She sat on the sack until the light went orange over the moor, then wrote a single word in the margin beside the empty space: Tomorrow. She closed the notebook and left the gatehouse unlocked, a small kindness, she told herself, to whoever came back to finish what they had started.