Close photograph of a small black lowercase 'be' lettering tattoo on the inner wrist of a person with blonde hair and a striped top.

Small lowercase 'be' lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person lies on a white bed with their hair falling over their face and one hand raised to their hair. A small, neat lowercase word 'be' is tattooed in black ink on the inner wrist, with clean, solid linework. The soft, bright composition is dominated by white bedding and a black and white striped top.

Lettering Forearm Word Script Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hanna kept the toll-stone at the top of Carrick Pass, and every spring she chiselled a fresh letter into it for whoever could read. The mules came up the switchbacks with salt and wool, and the drovers stopped to see what the stone had to say. Most years it said little. That spring it said "be", two small letters cut shallow into the grey, and nobody could agree what it meant.

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The carter Tomas laughed and said it was half a word, a stump of something bigger that a lazy mason had left. His brother said it was a warning to keep your head down in the snow. A girl named Ida, who had come up with her uncle's flock and could not read at all, sat on the wall and said nothing. She laid her palm flat on the letters and felt how smooth the cut was, worn by years of weather into something softer than it had been.

When the cloud came down that evening, the men argued and the mules grew restless, and Ida walked to the edge of the path with her hand still on the stone. She could feel the drop without seeing it. Hanna's voice came out of the mist asking what she was doing, and Ida said she was staying still, the way the stone seemed to. Hanna laughed and said that was the whole sermon, and went to fetch the lantern.

They slept in the hut that night. In the morning the cloud had lifted and the path showed clear below them, and Ida saw that the stone had been turned so its word faced downhill, toward the people still climbing. By noon the mules were through. The stone looked the same as ever, asking the same small thing of anyone who stopped to read it.