Fine black script lettering tattoo running down the upper arm of a woman in a white vest top and camouflage trousers.

Script lettering on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman takes a mirror selfie, cropped below the lips, wearing a loose white vest top, camouflage trousers, a chunky gold necklace and a gold watch. Several lines of black script lettering run vertically down the outer upper arm, with thin, even linework and no visible shading. The ink appears black and grey against a plain wood floor and a white sofa in the background, and the words are too small to read clearly.

Lettering Upper arm Script Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter came the week the beck froze, tucked inside a seed catalogue my father never ordered from. Mam's hand was smaller than I remembered, and the ink had run where rain got in through the letterbox. I read it standing at the Aga with my coat still on, the dogs whining at the back door for their tea.

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She had written the same few lines she always scrawled on the back of feed sacks, the ones I used to chalk up on the byre wall: ewe on the north field, Tuesday, watch the grey one. Halfway down the page she had started a second column, short lines stacked one under another, and I could only make out a word here and there before the crease swallowed them. Sold. Wether. Hold on. It looked like instructions, or a list of things she had meant to say and never got round to.

I spent the afternoon at the kitchen table with the magnifying glass from the tack room, copying each line onto the back of last year's calendar. By dusk I had the shape of something, though nothing I could finish. I walked the frozen track to the top field in the last of the light, where the grey ewe stood alone by the gate with her breath clouding over the rails.

I read the list aloud to her, every line, as if she might tell me which bit was meant for me. She didn't look up. I folded the calendar into my pocket and let the rest stay unread.