Black and white photograph of two interlocked hands with small black script lettering tattooed on the fingers.

Small script words on interlocked fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are pressed together with fingers interlocked, shown in a close black and white photograph. Two small tattoos of looped, script-style lettering in black ink sit on the fingers, and the letters are too small to read clearly. The soft grey tones and tight framing keep the focus on the hands and the lettering.

Lettering Hand Hand Finger Script Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the stove's the only warm thing on this boat, and I'll not tell it twice. Ruth Gilling had the Mary Ellen out of Gloucester the winter the canal froze to the bottom, carrying coal for a brewer's cellar, with a man called Tobias Eyre working the other end of the rope. They'd no words for each other that anyone could hear. Men on the towpath shouted insults across the lock and he shouted back something rude about her mother's mule, and that was courting, the way it was done then.

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Then the ice broke and the cold got into the hull, and one night at Sharpness he came aboard with his hands raw and held them out to the stove. She took them. Not to warm them, mind. She laced her fingers through his, palm to palm, the way you'd close a gate against the wind, and they sat like that until the coal glowed. In the morning she had a pen-nib and a bottle of ink from the chandler's. She wrote a word on the back of her middle finger and he wrote one on his, small and looping, the sort of hand a schoolmistress gives you. You couldn't read them with the hands pressed flat like that. That was the point.

Ask me what the words said and I'll tell you what she told me: a thing only you can read is the one thing nobody can take off you at the lock gate. He died the summer after, of a fever off the Severn, and she worked the boat alone for forty years. Every time she closed her hand on a rope, that blue prick of ink was there underneath, and nobody on this cut ever learned what it said.