Close view of a black script tattoo reading Remain you on the inner wrist of a hand with long nude nails.

Script wording on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is raised with long, pale, almond-shaped nails, and the inner wrist shows the words Remain you in black script lettering. The strokes are fine and even with a few softer grey tones, and the wording runs diagonally up towards the thumb side. The background is dark, with a black leather surface beneath the arm, which keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Forearm Script Text Wording

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cuttings went into the wall bed on the Tuesday after the frost, forty of them, each tied to a split cane with green garden twine. Mum had labelled none of them. She said a rose that needed a name was already half lost, and she sent me down the slope with a trowel and a biscuit tin of old seed packets to fill the gaps.

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The tin held packets from the nineteen-fifties, and tucked inside the lid was a folded slip in her square capitals: REMAIN YOU. Nothing else. I asked what it meant and she said it was the instruction for the coral climber, the one that would not root unless you left it alone. Lifting it out of the compost every week to check was what had killed the others, she said, and she had the dead stems in a bucket to prove it.

So I left it. I watered the bed from the butt, pulled the chickweed by hand, and stopped pressing my thumb into the soil each evening to see whether it had taken. In March a pale green nub came through at the join of the cane, no bigger than a lentil, and I stood there in my wellingtons until the light went off the wall.

I wrote the words out again on a brown luggage label and tied it to the cane myself, so anyone who came down the slope would know to keep their hands off. Mum read it from the kitchen window and said nothing. She just nodded, the way she does when a seedling is up and nobody needs telling.