Black script reading Strength inside an outlined heart, with a blue and purple flower at the top left, tattooed on a shoulder.

Strength script and purple flower heart on shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A black outlined heart with the word Strength written in flowing script across its centre. A blue and purple flower sits at the upper left of the heart, with purple shading along the heart's lower edge. The tattoo is photographed close up on smooth skin, with the shoulder and upper back filling the frame.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Heart Flower Script Word Strength

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You arrive at the dye-house at the edge of Ashgrove the morning the frost first lifts from the bracken, and Mrs Penhallow is already standing over the copper with her sleeves rolled past the elbow. She does not look up. She says the wool must be in the vat by seven or the violet will go grey, and the bluebells in the wood only give their colour for an hour after dawn, while the sap is still rising in them. You have been told this three times since Michaelmas, and you still do not quite believe her.

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You carry the baskets down the path between the hazels, where the flowers grow in blue drifts under the trees, and you pick until your knuckles ache. Back at the copper you crush the petals with a wooden spoon, add alum and a handful of ash, and lower the skeins in one at a time. The first time it comes out pale and you say it will do. She lifts a skein on her forearm, studies it the way a farrier studies a hoof, and drops it back in. Nine times, she says. Nine dips, nine rinses, and the river will tell you when you are finished.

On the ninth rinse the water runs clear and the wool hangs heavy and deep, the colour of a bruise turning into a bloom. Mrs Penhallow scratches a word into the lid of the copper with her thumbnail, letters the damp wood can barely hold: STRENGTH. You ask what it is for. She wipes her hands and holds up her own, stained violet to the wrist, and says it is not a wish. It is the number of times you were willing to go back in.