Close photo of a forearm held out against a grey concrete wall, with three small black glyph-like symbols in a row tattooed along the inside of the arm in a lettering style.

Three black glyph symbols on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three small, separate black symbols run in a line along the forearm, each with looping strokes and a curled tail. The ink is solid, with even, bold lines and no shading. The arm is stretched out with the hand raised, set against a textured grey concrete wall, with the tattoos in the centre of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Symbol Glyph Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't touch the sign on the gatepost yet, the one with the tail curled back. That is the first of three, and you will want all three before the sun clears the ridge. My grandmother's grandmother cut them into the rock at Thirst Well when the salt caravans still came through, and she always said the well would answer one question for anyone who could say the marks aloud in the right order.

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Samad Veer came to it with eleven camels and his dead brother's bell. He had lost the brother to a dust storm two days out, and he had not stopped counting the animals since, one, two, three, ten, eleven, and always one short. He read the first mark, the open loop like a stirrup. He read the second, the knot that goes round itself twice. He read the third, the hook that catches its own tail, and he asked the well where the bell had gone.

The well did not speak in a voice. It rang. Far off, over the eastern dune, a bell answered, flat and cracked on one side the way his brother's had been. Samad went up the slope with the rope still in his hand. At the crest he found the lead camel standing alone, its bell swinging, and beyond it the long pale road running back toward the salt towns, with no footprints on it but his own.

He led the eleven home along the ridge and never once looked back at the well. My grandmother said that was the cleverest part of the story, because the marks only ever tell you where something is, never where you ought to go to fetch it.