Script quote across upper back
Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo
A black and white photograph of a person's upper back, with a cursive script quote running across the shoulders and a decorative flourish curving below the words. The linework is bold and clean, with soft shading in the letter strokes. The dark background and close framing keep the focus on the lettering, with a partial tattoo visible at the left edge.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The wine has gone warm in the cup, and Tullius is already reaching across the table for your knife before you have decided whether to give it to him. Beyond the wall of the fort the river runs loud with spring meltwater, and somewhere a sentry is singing badly about a girl in Mogontiacum. You have known him four years, long enough to know he will not ask twice.
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He wants the vow spoken before the cup is passed, and he makes you say it first, because you are the one who taught him to read the standards. Bleed with me, you tell him, and you will be my brother for ever. The words come out rough in the mongrel Latin of the camps, and when he laughs, the blood on his thumb shows dark against the wine.
Afterwards the two of you sit on the rampart until the watch changes, passing the cup like boys with a stolen pear. He talks about a farm near Sirmium he means to buy with his savings, a fat mare, a wife who will laugh at his accent. You listen and think how one sentence can outlast the fort, the river and the emperor who sent you both here.
Thirty years later a surveyor's boy finds a bronze ring in the mud of the old bank, its inside scratched with a looping hand. Nobody reads it aloud. The boy turns it over twice in the light, decides it is worth nothing, and drops it back where the water can keep it.
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