Black script lettering on the inner upper arm reads Sky above me, Earth below me, Fire within me.

Three-line script quote on inner upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of three lines of black script lettering on the inner upper arm, reading Sky above me, Earth below me and Fire within me. The lettering is smooth, even and cursive, with a mix of thick and thin strokes. The image is cropped below the chin and above the elbow, with a plain grey wall and a dark top in the background.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Script Text Sky Earth Fire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has set you to the margin of the Psalter because your hand is the steadiest in the scriptorium, and because nobody else will sit beside the lime kiln for the hours it takes to grind soot. Tonight the wind comes off the moor and pushes smoke through the cracks in the shutters, so the candle lies flat and you have to cup it with your palm to see the nib.

Keep reading

The line is not from the Psalter. It came in a folded scrap from the cellarer's boy, who had it from a fishwife at the harbour below the abbey, and nobody at the table could say whether it was prayer or charm. Sky above me, earth below me, fire within me. Anselm read it twice, frowned at the word within, and told you to copy it small in the bottom corner, where the rubricator's mistakes are scraped away and no abbot looks.

So you write it in the old black, the ink you mixed from kitchen soot and oak gall and a spoon of wine, in a slow hand with thick downstrokes and thin hairlines where the nib lifts. The letters lean like people leaning into weather. When you finish, the corner is dark enough that the candle hardly shows it, and you think of the bakehouse furnace, the bell rope, the damp flags where you have knelt for years, and the sky you have only ever seen through the slats of the north window.

Brother Anselm blows out the candle without looking up. In the dark you hear him say the three lines once under his breath, the way a man tests a step he has not trusted before, and then the bell for matins starts and you find you are already standing.