Black and grey photo of two rows of fine line angular symbols tattooed on the hand and wrist, one above the other.

Two rows of angular glyphs on the hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two rows of angular black glyphs are tattooed on skin, one set above the other, and they resemble runic or invented characters. The lines are thin and even, with sharp corners and open ends, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The photograph is black and white, with the skin creases and soft focus of a close, handheld shot.

Fine line Hand Glyph Rune Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias Hanning could cut a letter into oak so fine that the rain could not get into it, but he could not read a single word he cut. His mother had taught him the old angular shapes from a book of angles, and the shapes went onto the mill beams and the chapel lintel, and nobody in Thornbeck asked what they said. So when Marta Vell climbed the hill with a question folded in her apron, she did not ask him to read. She asked him to write.

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The question was whether her father would let her marry the boy from the salt pans. The answer had to be in the old shapes, because the old shapes were what her father trusted. Tobias cut it onto two slates, one row above the other, leaving the ends of each stroke open so the frost could not close them up over winter. He did not ask what he had written, and Marta did not tell him. At Candlemas she carried the slates down to the wedding supper and set them on the table between the bread and the bride's cup.

Her father could read the old shapes better than anyone living. He turned the slates to the lamp and went quiet, and the fiddler stopped to watch him. The top row, he said, meant that the river was high and the bridge was low. The bottom row meant that the salt boy would carry her across it anyway. Then he laughed until he had to wipe his eyes, and he poured the wine himself.

The slates hung above the mill door for forty years. Tobias never learned what they said, and Marta never once asked him to.