Black script lettering reading 'Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered' across the upper thigh.

Script quote across the upper thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of cursive black script run across the skin of an upper leg, reading 'Through dangers untold' above 'And hardships unnumbered'. The linework is clean and even, with solid black ink and no visible shading. The photo is taken close up on a red background, with the text sitting diagonally across the frame.

Lettering Thigh Script Lettering Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had the cold hands for it, Prior Osric said, so the copying of the pilgrims' roll fell to me the winter the snow closed the pass. I was nineteen and had never been further than the mill at Hollin. The roll was a list of names and home villages, and beside each name the brothers wrote a line the pilgrim had chosen, a kindness to carry down the road. Most asked for nothing. A carter named Tobias asked that his line be written in the old rounded hand, with the long-tailed letters, because his mother had taught him to read from a book like that.

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Through dangers untold, he had dictated, and hardships unnumbered. I sanded the page, ruled my margin, and wrote it twice to be sure the spacing sat right, the second line tucked under the first and sloping a little toward the spine where the vellum was thinnest. When the ink dried I caught myself reading the words over and over, the way a man counts steps in the dark.

Tobias came for his page in March, thinner, with a bandage on his wrist where a wolf had found him on the high road. He read the lines for a long time. Then he laughed, not unkindly, and said the words were true enough, but he had only meant the first half for himself. The second, he said, was for whoever had to carry the cart back down after him.

I did not know what to say, so I blotted the page and handed it over. He folded it inside his coat and went down the mountain before the thaw, and I kept the ink-stained rule of my margin in my head for years afterwards, long after I had forgotten the names around it.