Black and grey flash design of a triangle with POWER, COURAGE and WISDOM on banners, with a sword and shield beside it.

Triangle with Power, Courage and Wisdom banners

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A white line drawing on a black background shows a large triangle divided into three smaller triangles, with a banner across the top reading POWER, a banner across the lower section reading COURAGE and WISDOM, and a serpent wrapped around the apex. A small shield outline and a sword sit to the sides. The linework is bold with a speckled, distressed texture and no shading, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Lettering Triangle Banner Courage Serpent Sword Shield

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop looking at the lock-keeper's dog. Three sisters were born on a Kennet barge the winter the ice took the towpath. Their mother, who could not read, had three words burnt into a brass plate and nailed above the tiller: Power, Courage, Wisdom. Nobody told the girls which word was theirs, so they fought over it the way children fight over sweets.

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Maud, the eldest, took the tiller at twelve and never let it go. She could heave a lock gate alone and thought that made her captain of the whole river. Edie, the middle one, walked to Newbury through a hard frost to fetch a doctor for a bargee's boy, and came back carrying the doctor on her back when his mare went lame. Ruth, the youngest, said very little and watched the water, and her sisters called her simple until the spring the Kennet came over the weir, brown as stewed tea.

The flood came round the bend like a serpent with its head up, and it swung the barge sideways into the reeds. Maud hauled on the tiller until her palms split, and the boat only spun. Edie went over the side with a rope, and the current nearly had her under. Ruth sat on the roof, looked at the water for a long moment, and said, 'Let it take us to the shallows, not against it.' They did. The barge grounded gently on the gravel bar below the mill, and nobody drowned.

That summer the sisters sawed the brass plate in three and gave each a piece, but Ruth's was the only one that stayed bright, because she was the only one who ever looked at it. Maud still steers the Kennet boats. Edie still carries what needs carrying. And if you ask me which of them had the lot, I'll tell you it was the one who sat still long enough to see where the river was going.