Black Arabic script reading Just breathe, with the English translation in a typewriter-style serif beneath, on a plain white background.

Arabic lettering reading Just breathe

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two lines of text on a white background: Arabic script in bold black lettering at the top, and the English words Just breathe in a serif typeface below. The Arabic letterforms are solid and even, with no shading or fine detail. The composition is centred and simple, with plenty of white space around the text.

Lettering Arabic script Breathe Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had buried the lane by four o'clock, and by nine the only sounds in the Hollin Fell inn were the coal settling in the grate and the hall clock, which you had stopped twice because it ran fast. You are behind the bar with a tea towel over your shoulder when the young man from room six comes down the stairs in his socks, holding his phone up like a lamp. His hand shakes so badly the screen trembles. He says his sister is not answering, the line keeps dropping, and the storm has taken the mast on the ridge.

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You do not tell him that signal here has always been a rumour. You pour him a glass of water instead and slide across the card your mother kept propped against the till for thirty years, its Arabic lettering inked in her careful hand: فقط تنفس. Beneath it, in English, the words she added so the customers could read them too. Just breathe. He reads it twice. His lips move as he tries the sounds, and you watch him notice he is holding the glass with both hands.

Then the phone finds a single bar and a woman's voice comes through, thin and cross, saying she is fine, she is sitting in a lay-by near Skipton with a flask and a blanket, and she has been telling him to calm down for twenty minutes. He laughs, a short wet sound, and sits down on the bottom stair.

You wipe the bar where it does not need wiping. Outside, the snow keeps falling through the yellow square the window throws onto the drift, and you think of your mother saying the lettering was the easy part. The hard part was remembering to do it between all the other things.