Stacked rocks and grass with the word unless

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A pile of rounded rocks in browns, reds and ochre sits on the side of the torso, with green grass growing around the base. The word UNLESS is carved into the largest stone at the centre, and the shapes are shaded with soft highlights and darker edges. The design fills the side of the body in a horizontal composition against pale skin, with a yellow top at the upper edge.

Ribs Rock Stone Grass Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stones had been stacked by someone who meant to come back for them. Mara knew this because the moss on the lowest one had grown in a neat ring, the way moss does only when nobody has touched a thing for years. She crouched on the shingle at the bottom of the cove, tide pulling at her boots, and read the word cut into the biggest rock in the middle. UNLESS. Just that, with no sentence around it.

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Her grandmother had a habit of saying it at the end of every promise. I will be home by six, unless. I will pay you back, unless. Mara had always assumed it was a joke, a way of keeping her options open, and she had resented it the way you resent a door left ajar in winter. Now she ran her thumb along the letters and found the grooves were worn smooth, as if someone had pressed them over and over with a fingertip while thinking.

She built the top stone on the cairn herself before the light went, balancing a rust-red pebble where a gap seemed to want filling. The grass was soft and damp round its base. The tide was coming, and it would take the lower rocks first, the way it took everything in its own time. She waited, her hands cold, to see whether the stack would stand.

It stood. Mara walked up the path with the word in her head and, for the first time, heard it as a kind of hinge rather than an escape.