Black and grey lettering tattoo on the inner forearm, with a quote and a triangle symbol in the upper photo and a second quote in the lower photo.

Two quotes tattooed along a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two black and grey photographs show the same forearm, with a quotation in a serif typeface above a triangle enclosing a circle and a vertical line. The lower panel shows a second, longer quotation in a handwritten-style font running along the forearm. The solid black linework is crisp against pale skin and a striped grey backdrop.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Far past the last dry river, where the salt towns had given up their names, Orla Venn walked the road to the ferry with a dead man's letter folded in her coat. It said three things waited at the end of the road, and that she should take only what she could carry without bending.

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The ferryman at Cullen Reach would not take her coin. He read the letter, looked at the tide, and said the old keeper had paid for the crossing and written her name on the bench. He rowed her over grey water where nothing grew. On the far shore sat a slab of pale stone, round as a moon, with a crack through it like a hair.

She turned it over twice. It was warm. When she set it on her palm, her grandmother's voice said her name from somewhere inside, so softly she had to hold her breath to catch it. Orla felt the pull of it in her chest, the wish to sit down beside that voice and never stand again. She remembered the letter's words about dwelling, and she set the stone back in the sand unrung and walked on.

Beyond the dunes stood a plain iron rod with a single thread of light running down its length. A hand's width of it turned the dark gully behind her into a lit path. She took it, and it burned cold and steady in her grip. The third thing was a grey wool cloak folded on a fence post. She left it there for whoever came next.

In the far town the children asked what she had found. She told them a light, and a little ordinary sorrow, and that she had been glad to leave the rest where it lay.