Fine line black quotation marks tattooed on the inner wrist of a raised hand, with stacks of books blurred in the background.

Small quotation mark tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand with its inner wrist facing the camera shows a small pair of black quotation marks tattooed across the wrist crease. The linework is thin and solid, with no shading, and the ink is black. The background is a soft blur of stacked books in cream, tan and brown tones against a pale blue wall, which keeps the focus on the wrist.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Hand Punctuation Book Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The king had never once been interrupted in his own library, and so when the scribe Orrin set down his pen mid-sentence and said, quite loudly, that the royal decree was being spoken by someone else, the whole chamber turned to stare at him. He was not a brave man. He had a cough, a wife who sold candles at the river gate, and a habit of copying other men's words so neatly that nobody noticed whose they were. But he had been copying the king's words for nineteen years, and in all that time he had never once been asked to write a thing he had not first been given.

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"Read it back to me," said the king. Orrin did. Every word was there. Every word was the king's. Only the quotation marks were missing, the small curled pair that would have told the reader where the king's voice ended and somebody else's began. A decree with no quotation marks, Orrin explained, sounded like the king had thought every sentence himself. The chancellor laughed. The king did not.

That night the king sent for him alone and asked him to mark the decree properly, so that the people would know which lines came from the throne and which from the scribes who had polished them. Orrin took his finest nib and inked two small marks, one on each side of a single line, and then, because his hands were shaking, he pressed a third into the soft skin of his own wrist to steady them. The king never noticed. The people did. By spring the whole kingdom wrote its speeches with a pair of small marks in the margin, and nobody could say for certain who had started it.