Small script mark on the nape of the neck
Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo
A black and white photograph of the back of a woman's neck, with her hair tied up in loose, messy waves. A small, delicate mark resembling stylised lettering or a symbol sits centrally on the nape. The fine, thin linework is dark and crisp against the skin, and the tight framing keeps the tattoo as the clear focal point.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The pear trees at Hollin Cross would not fruit for the steward, so the old gardener sent his granddaughter out to them with a knife and a pot of wax. Nell was nine and sulky about it. She scored a small curl into the bark of each trunk, a loop with a hook drawn sideways like a question that had been folded in half, and sealed it with wax so the rain could not get in.
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Nobody told her what the mark meant. Her grandfather said only that the trees had to know whose they were before they would trust the season. She asked the blackbird that nested in the wall, and the blackbird said nothing, which she took for agreement.
The first frost came early that year and took the blossom from every tree but one. The steward came out with a lantern to cut the lot down and found Nell standing under the last pear with her arms round the trunk, her cheek pressed against the wax as if to keep it warm. He stopped. He said he had never once in forty years seen that mark on a tree that had been given up on.
That autumn the pear bore so heavily a branch split under it, and the steward let the split branch stand. Nell still goes out each spring with the wax pot, though the trees are sure of her now. She says the mark is only a letter she keeps for them, and that they answer it.
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