Black and grey image of two hands holding pistols, with the word VERITAS lettered across the knuckles and fingers and rosary beads wrapped around the wrists.

Veritas lettering on two hands holding pistols

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands hold handguns against a pale background, with the word VERITAS tattooed across the fingers and knuckles of each hand. Rosary beads hang from the wrists, and the image is rendered in high-contrast greyscale with strong black shadows on the metal and skin. The composition is centred on the pistols, with the hands framing the lettering in the lower half.

Lettering Hand Lettering Pistol Hand Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have kept the village ledger for eleven winters, which people say the way they say a dog is good with children, half praise and half warning. Tonight the bell at Saint Aldric's has finished the evening angelus, and you stand at the edge of the beech wood with Tomas Harrow. He has a pistol pushed into his coat and a rosary wound twice around his wrist, its black beads clicking against each other whenever he shifts his weight. He wants to know who sold the Fenwick ewes at the autumn fair. He is certain it was someone he trusts, and that certainty is what has brought a gun into the wood.

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You tell him the rule of the old chapel, the one nobody has needed since your grandmother's time. Whoever swears at the altar stone must tell the whole of it, or the wood keeps the lie and gives back nothing but cold. He does not like it. He takes the pistol from his coat anyway and sets it on the moss, muzzle turned toward the trees, the way a man puts down a thing he has decided he cannot trust with himself. Then he lays his palm on the stone and begins.

The truth is smaller than the gun. His younger brother sold the ewes to settle a debt at the Crown, and Tomas knew it within a day and kept quiet for a year because saying it aloud would have made it real. You write it into the ledger in the ink that never fades, then read it back to him until he nods at every line.

By morning the pistol has gone from the moss and the rosary lies coiled on the altar stone. In the ledger, beneath the ewes, someone has added a single word in a hand that is not yours, and it is the first thing you have ever read there that you did not have to check.