Black ink flash sheet of a sword, a bare branch, a bubbling cauldron and a star in a circle with rays, drawn in hatched linework on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sword, branch, cauldron and star flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink flash sheet on paper showing a crossed sword and bare branch, a bubbling cauldron at the bottom left and a star inside a circle with radiating rays at the top right. The linework is fine and detailed, using hatching and stippling for shading, with no colour. The designs are spaced across the sheet with plenty of blank paper between them.

Sword Branch Star Sun Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marta, the drifts reached the top of the stable door on Tuesday, and Father has stopped pretending the road to Carrick will open before Easter. So we are snowed in with eleven travellers, a sack of barley and the black pot, which has never once been scrubbed properly and which Mrs Pell insists on keeping over the fire regardless.

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The traveller in the blue coat is a cutler's son from Hexham, sent north to sell a sword he will not name. Last night he laid it on the bar to show us the grip, a plain ring of bone, and then set a bare ash switch across the blade like a cross on a grave. Nobody laughed. Mrs Pell said that a blade and a switch were the old way of marking a boundary, that you could not cross a threshold with iron on one side and green wood on the other. Then she stirred the pot, and the steam went up into the rafters and hung there in the shape of a star, the way it does when the frost is hard.

I have decided to stop asking her what it means. She tells me things the way she tells the weather, and I have learned to keep my hands busy and listen. Tonight she says the sword wants to go back to the forge, and the switch will take root in the thaw wherever he throws it. Father says that is nonsense and has bolted the door.

Write back soon, even if the post coach is buried. I am keeping your half of the bed warm with a hot brick and a good deal of ill temper.

Yours, Ilse