Black ink tattoo of a runic inscription set within a horizontal band on the upper back, just below the neckline of a dark top.

Runic inscription across upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tattoo on the upper back, where the skin meets a dark top at the neckline. The design is a row of angular runic characters enclosed between a pair of horizontal rules, drawn in solid, even lines with no shading. The plain background of light skin and a dark garment keeps the black ink as the clear focus of the composition.

Back Rune

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the kingdom of Ostmere, where the river Lenn ran fast under seven bridges, the keeper of the Hollin Bridge cut one name into the stone each winter. He used a short knife and a copy of the old letters his grandmother had scratched onto her spindle whorl. Each name went between two level lines, so the bridge would know where it began and where it ended.

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The people of Ostmere brought him the names of those the river had taken. A miller's boy, a widow's husband, a pedlar who had sung too loudly on the ice. He cut them without asking why, and he never cut the same name twice. For thirty winters the row grew across the lintel, and the children learned to count the marks rather than the years.

One autumn a girl came to the bridge with a wet hem and a lantern that would not stay lit. She said she had been told a name would be waiting for her there, and she could not read the letters. The keeper ran his thumb along the row and stopped at the last stone, where the bars stood open and empty.

"That one is not carved yet," he said. "It waits for whoever is foolish enough to cross in the dark and stop to ask." She laughed, but she stayed by the parapet until the lantern caught, and when the water rose he took out his knife and began.