Black script lettering reading Let me be on the upper arm and a solid black cross on the ribs, both in a simple lettering and bold outline style.

Script on upper arm and cross on ribs

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with both arms raised wears a white bandeau top, with her face cropped out of the frame. A thin black script reading Let me be runs along the upper arm, and a bold solid black cross sits on the side of the ribs. The image is shot in warm, low light against a dark background, which makes the black ink stand out clearly against the skin.

Lettering Upper arm Ribs Cross Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You step into the village hall at Market Deeping on a Saturday in October, and the first thing you notice is that nobody has moved the trestle tables since the Lent jumble sale. Someone has pinned a paper banner over the stage reading Class of '89, the 8 hanging slightly crooked. Mrs Oakes, who taught you RE and once confiscated your Walkman in assembly, is already at the urn, and she spots you before you can reverse back out the door.

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"Dawn Pritchard," she says, as if you were still eleven and late with a permission slip. She hands you a cup of tea you did not ask for and tells you about her hip, her grandson, the new vicar with the beard. You nod. You know where this goes. Everyone wants to ask why you left before the sixth form, and you have spent thirty years practising the same answer: that you liked the quiet of the fen roads, the long flat light, the church bells you could hear from your own back step.

Across the room, Kevin Dunn is telling a story about a fight behind the bike sheds, and people are laughing too loudly. You remember the words you wrote on the inside cover of your geography book the winter your mother was ill: LET ME BE. You meant it as a prayer, though you were thirteen and had no idea who you were praying to. Mrs Oakes is watching you with the same look she gave you then, the look that said she understood more than she was going to say.

When she finally asks, you tell her the truth. "I'm still trying to," you say, and she laughs, softly, and touches your hand the way she used to touch the brass cross at the front of chapel, as if checking it was still there. Nobody, you realise, has ever asked you what you wanted.