Small black letter Y tattoo on the side of a person's torso, with one hand resting near it and a striped top.

Small letter Y tattoo on the side

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop shows a small, simple capital letter Y in black ink on the side of the torso, below the arm. The letter is drawn with clean, even linework and solid fill, with no shading or background elements. The image is in colour, but the only ink is black against light skin, with a striped black and white top and a wrist bracelet in the frame.

Lettering Ribs Letter Initial

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put another log on, and mind the sparks, for this is a tale about a stone, and I will not have it go cold in my mouth. Where the salt road splits from the Tessel road there is a milestone, and on its face a letter is cut as deep as a man's thumb: a Y, two arms reaching up and a stem driving down into the dirt. Ask any carter and he will say it is only a sign, and so it was, until the year the well at Kallo turned bitter.

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A stonecutter called Mopsos was paid by the widow Eudoxa to make that mark. Her two sons had gone out with the same caravan, one east to the copper pits and one west to the ships, and she wanted every traveller to know which way the sweet water lay. Mopsos measured twice, as stonecutters do, then cut the left arm a finger longer than the right. When she asked why, he said a chisel has no patience for symmetry, and the road cares even less. She paid him in dried figs, and he went home thinking no more of it.

The younger son, Lykos, came back limping after eleven winters, following the left arm of that stone because it was the only thing in the valley that pointed where his brother had gone. He found the stem first, where the rain had pooled in the deepest cut, and he knelt there a long while with his hand flat on the cold letter. Then he scratched a small line beside the stem, and another after it, one for each winter his mother had waited at the fork.

The rain still gathers in that old cut, and the mornings still bring fresh scratches beside it, some straight, some shaking, all counting something the stone was never asked to hold.