Small black fine line angular lettering sits on the inner wrist, photographed at a slight angle against a pale forearm.

Small angular lettering on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of three angular characters in thin black linework sits on the inner wrist, where it is partly visible below a light sweater sleeve. The characters appear rotated, and the lines are uniform and crisp with no shading. The skin tone is warm and the photograph is taken in soft, dim light with a dark background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Letter Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The snow has shut the Coldharbour road since Tuesday, so the carrier cannot get through with your letter about the roof money. I am writing this one in the back room by the stove, where the ink stays liquid. Three guests are stuck with us: a drover named Pell who snores like a sawmill, a widow heading north to bury her sister, and a surveyor who keeps asking to see the cellar. I have given him the cellar. He can count the casks himself.

The thing I wanted to tell you about is the lintel. You will remember old Hasko, who cut the sign over the yard gate the year before Father died. We always thought the marks were ornament, three angular shapes like a fence of broken arrows. Last night, with the wind rattling the shutters, the surveyor climbed up with a lamp and read them aloud, but upside down. He said Hasko had carved them from the wrong side of the stone, so the whole inn had been saying something backwards for forty years.

Read the right way round, the letters came out as a name, or the start of one. Pell swore it was a warning about the ice. The widow only laughed and said that was exactly how Hasko would have wanted it, since he never once got a thing the right way round in his life.

I went out at dawn to look. The lamp had frozen to the sill and the marks stood plain under a crust of white. Turned the proper way, they were not a name at all. I will tell you what they were when the road opens. Keep the kettle warm.

Your loving sister, Martha