Two small black fine line tattoos, an X and an O, placed on the wrists of two raised arms in black sleeves.

XO tattoos on both wrists

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two raised arms show a small letter X on the left wrist and a letter O on the right wrist, both drawn in thin black linework. The tattoos are simple and monochrome, set against a plain white background with the dark sleeves at the bottom of the frame. The fist and open palm form a balanced, uncluttered composition that keeps the focus on the tattoos.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Letter Hand

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is low and this one is long. Brother Anselm had the finest hand in the scriptorium at Saint Ebba's, and he knew it, which is why God sent him Hild to humble him. She was the miller's daughter from Wenhaston, and she could not read a single letter, not even her own name.

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Every week she came to the gatehouse with a question about her dead father's strip of barley, and every week Anselm wrote out her claim in his beautiful script while she watched his quill like a hawk watches a field mouse. When it came time to sign, she would not make a cross, because she said the abbot had the cross and she did not want to borrow it. She made an X instead, two strokes crossed like the sticks of a broken fence. Anselm laughed at her. Then one wet morning she told him that in her village a kiss was an X, and a ring drawn round was an arm wrapped about a person, and that half the parish's business had been settled that way for as long as anyone could remember.

He did not forget it. When the old abbot died and the charters were sealed and carried off to the bishop, Anselm sat alone with a clean sheet of vellum. He wrote nothing else on it. He drew a small X, then an O beside it, sanded the ink until it dried, and folded the sheet into his sleeve.

The next spring the mill at Wenhaston ran again, and a sack of new flour came up the hill with no letter attached. Hild looked at the folded vellum for a long time before she opened it. Anselm was never asked what it meant, and he never said.