Black block lettering reading STAY ALIVE with a small line symbol beneath it, tattooed on the inside of a wrist in a simple lettering style.

Stay Alive lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the inside of a raised wrist and palm, with the hand partly cropped at the top. The words STAY ALIVE are set in solid black capitals with angular letterforms, and a small symbol made of vertical and diagonal strokes sits beneath them. The ink is crisp and even on pale skin, and the plain background keeps the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Forearm Text Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the pass by its wind before you learn its path. By the time the snow starts drifting sideways across the col at Cerrin, the mule has stopped twice and refused once, and the tally stick at your belt carries eleven notches from the spring crossings. The old woman at the last hut gave it to you with her thumb pressed to the wood. She could not write, so the words were scratched by a surveyor passing through: STAY ALIVE, and beneath them a short upright stroke with a slanted one leaning across its foot. In the valley, she told you, that mark means a road is open.

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Halfway down the far side the track vanishes under a cornice, and you have to lead the mule along the edge of nothing, testing each step with your staff. Your fingers have stopped reporting back. You think about turning around, and then you think about the hut behind you, the fire, the woman who will check your notch when you return and ask whether the road held. You shout into the white just to hear your own voice. It comes back flat and close, like a stranger in the next room.

Near the bottom, where the rock gives way to scrub, you find a cairn built at waist height. On its flat top sits a slate with the same two marks, weathered almost to nothing, and beside it a clay bowl holding a crust of frozen bread. Somebody made it through and left a sign for the next fool. You break the crust, feed the mule the larger piece, and cut your twelfth notch so deep the stick splits a little at the end.