Two black script tattoos on forearms, one reading Forgive my sins and the other Touch my soul, with a red braided bracelet at the wrist.

Script quotes on two forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown close together, each with a line of black cursive script: Forgive my sins on the upper arm and Touch my soul on the lower one. The lettering has smooth, even strokes with soft shading at the edges of the letters. The warm, slightly muted photograph has a red and orange braided bracelet on one wrist, and the skin tones dominate the frame.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Bracelet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The priest on Calder Ring stopped hearing confessions the spring the lower scrubbers failed, so the booths on Deck Nine now hold a cantor-unit with a voice like warm tin. You arrive with the braid in your fist, red and orange thread your sister knotted round your wrist before the transfer to Meridian, when she made you swear you would not take it off until you had said the thing out loud.

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The partition between the booths has a grille the width of a palm. You press your forearm to it because the metal is cold and the cantor is slow to start. Through the holes you feel another arm meet yours, the ink on it the same black cursive you carry: a line for each of you, the words running down toward the wrist. Forgive my sins above, touch my soul below, as though the two of you had been written out in one hand and then cut in half.

"State your offence," the cantor says. You do not, not at first. You let her fingers find yours through the mesh, and you hear her breathe the way she did on the night the lights went out in the hydroponics bay.

The cantor records nothing and promises nothing, which is the only honesty the station still allows. When you finally speak, your voice comes out small and exact. Afterwards you untie the braid from your wrist and push one end through the grille, and on the other side she knots it round her own arm, pulling it tight enough that the thread bites into the ink.