Black fine line script lettering reading 'the Lord's' runs along a forearm against a soft-focus green background.

Script lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand and forearm show a black script phrase that appears to read 'the Lord's', running diagonally from the wrist towards the elbow. The thin, flowing linework has looped letter forms and is solid black with no shading or colour. The background is a blurred green garden, and the sleeve of a dark patterned top sits at the top edge of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Phrase Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The blight came up the valley in the third week of September, and by the time Maud Hollins had walked the orchard rows there were more windfalls rotting in the grass than apples still hanging. She stood with her basket on her hip and counted what was left: forty good ones, perhaps forty-five. Her father had always set aside the first basket for the Lord's, lifting it onto the cart before anything was sold, and he had written the words on the wicker lid with a stub of chalk so nobody could mistake it.

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Her mother said it made no sense to give away the best of a bad year, and Maud agreed. She sat on the cart's tailboard with the lid in her lap and the chalk in her fist, thinking about the winter coming, the coal man who had already called twice, the twins who had outgrown their boots. The chalk left a grey smear on her thumb. She rubbed at it and only made it worse.

In the end she filled the basket and carried it up the lane to the chapel herself, past the lych gate, and left it on the step. She did not wait to see who came for it. Nobody had ever told her what the Lord did with apples.

In the morning the basket stood on her own doorstep, heavy again. Under a cloth lay a warm loaf, a jar of dripping, and a pair of boots that had been her mother's, soled and laced. The lid was propped against the handle, and someone had chalked a second line beneath the first in a careful, sloping hand: and Hollins's.