Close-up of a woman's shoulders showing two black fine line script quote tattoos, one on each collarbone near the shoulder.

Two script quotes along the collarbones

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a woman's upper body in a grey off-shoulder top, with a black script quote tattooed along each collarbone. The lettering is fine and even, and the words are too small and soft to read reliably at this size. The image is warm-toned with soft natural light and a shallow focus on the skin.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Script Quote Collarbone Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You take the pen from the dresser drawer because your mother's hands shake after the washhouse shift, and because the lamp on the kitchen table is the only one in Caddow Row that burns steady past ten. Down the valley the siren has gone for the night shift, and the slag heaps hold the last of the light. You write small, the way Nain taught you, so the paper can carry more than the postman expects.

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Owen went north in March, to a pit near Barnsley where the men speak in a way you can barely follow, and he has not written since the strike started. So you tell him everything. The brass band lost the Eisteddfod. The Jenkins boy fell off the tip wall and kept his teeth. Your father sits by the range now with his cap in his lap, not going anywhere, not saying much. You don't write that part large. You write it in the smallest hand you have.

His reply comes on a Thursday, folded inside a Yorkshire newspaper. It is only two lines in his cramped capitals: the lodgings have a cat, and he has learned the words of the old hymn after all, the ones about the hills that do not move. Underneath, he asks you to copy the last verse out for him, because he has forgotten how it ends.

You do it at the table with the lamp turned high. The letters are so fine they seem to shake in the light. When you finish, you fold the sheet twice, seal it with a drop of candle wax, and carry it up the hill to the box, where the train will take it north through the dark.