Black fine line tattoo of Tengwar Elvish script running across the inner upper arm of a person with the arm raised.

Tengwar script lettering on inner upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single line of Tengwar Elvish script is tattooed in black ink across the inner upper arm, with the arm raised above the head. The lettering has fine, even linework and a single dark tone, with no shading or colour. The photograph is taken at close range with backlighting, and the cropped frame shows only the lower face, hair, a black top and a pendant necklace.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had copied the Harrowmere tithe rolls for eleven winters before the strange hand appeared in the margin of the Lent psalter. Nobody in the scriptorium could read it. The letters stood on tall stems, each one hooked at the top like a shepherd's crook, and a single dot hovered above every third mark as though the scribe had lifted the pen and thought better of it.

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He carried the leaf to Prioress Maud on a cold Tuesday, when the mist hung so low over the mere that the bell tower looked cut off at the knees. She held it to the grey window for a long time. "It is not a hand I know," she said, "but I know a warning when I see one." Her thumb rested on the last line. "Do not ring the bell on the feast. The rope is sound. The wheel is not."

Nobody believed him until the thaw, when the wheel cracked clean through and fell into the nave, a yard from the spot where the choir stood on feast nights. Anselm spent the rest of the winter with a lamp and a torn sheet of parchment, copying the hooked letters one by one until his fingers ached and the dots began to look like stars. He learned the alphabet the way a man learns a road in the dark, by touch.

On the last page, after the warning, there was one more word he could read at last. It was his own name, spelled carefully, with a stroke added at the end that no monk in Harrowmere would ever have thought to write. He copied it into the psalter himself, in ordinary Latin letters, and beneath it, in the new script, he wrote: keep the rope and mind the wheel.