Back view of two calves with black outlined triangles, one holding red lettering reading WHY and the other NOT, in a lettering and geometric style on the calves.

Why and Not triangles on two calves

Lettering · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A back view of two lower legs showing a pair of tattoos. The left calf has the word WHY in red lettering inside an upward pointing black outlined triangle, and the right calf has NOT in red lettering inside a downward pointing black outlined triangle. The linework is bold and solid with flat red fill, set against grey camouflage leggings, grey Converse trainers and a grey shaggy rug.

Lettering Geometric Calf Triangle Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter had already unloaded the salt when Ilse asked him why the twin peaks above Kessel Pass had never been given names. He shrugged, shouldered his sack and said the mountain had never been asked. She took the question up the slope the next morning, past the goats and the frozen tarn, and found her sister Marit sitting on a flat stone with a pot of madder and a blackened stick.

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"Why are you marking yourself?" Ilse said. Marit did not look up. "Not your business." She pressed the stick to her calf and drew a triangle with its point down, then filled its edges with red until the lines looked like a cut that had decided to stay. Ilse sat beside her, pulled up her own trouser leg and drew a triangle with its point up. In the middle she wrote WHY, crooked as a fence post, and the two of them sat with their legs stretched toward the drop while the wind worked at their hair.

The snow came down the pass in the third week of autumn. The carter's cart was lost under it, and the goats were driven into the lower byre by whoever had the strength. Marit went ahead to the village with the last lantern, and Ilse stayed to count the flock, because she had asked why and wanted the answer before she left the mountain.

When the thaw came, the herders climbed up to find the sisters' bones, and found instead two shapes cut into the turf of the slope, one pointing up and one pointing down. Nobody could say which of the sisters had been right, but the shapes faced each other across the pass, and the wind had kept them clean.