Black Arabic script above the English words "Appreciate life" in quotation marks, on a plain white background.

Arabic script with "Appreciate life" text

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two lines of black lettering on white: Arabic script at the top and the English phrase "Appreciate life" in quotation marks beneath it. The Arabic strokes are bold and the English is a clean serif-style typeface, with no shading or ornament. The text is centred with generous white space around it, and no skin or body is visible.

Lettering Arabic script Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The board over the door of the Skelder dance hall had not been painted since the war, and by the time Nessa Pryce took the caretaker's key the letters had gone grey and furred with damp. She climbed the ladder one wet Thursday with a tin of black and a brush her father had used on boats. She had a scrap of paper with the strange shapes copied on it, drawn by her aunt who had come over the water as a girl and never learned to write them properly. The men in the yard stood under their caps and watched her do it, and nobody asked what it said, because nobody knew.

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Tomas Greave came every Saturday and sat in the corner with his fiddle across his knees, but he had not played since his wife Marta died in the spring. The dancers left him alone. They danced round the stove and the wet coats and the trestle tables, and the floorboards kept time without him.

On the Saturday after the board was done, a tinker came in from the road to get out of the rain. He looked up at the wall where the lamp shone on the fresh black lettering and read it aloud in a flat voice. He said it was a thing mothers said to children who would not eat their bread: look at the lamp while it is lit, because it will not stay lit for ever. Then he took his wet hat off and sat down.

Nobody said anything for a while. Then Tomas lifted the fiddle to his chin, slowly, the way a man lifts something he has been carrying a long way, and the first note went up into the rafters. Nessa stood by the door with the paint still on her fingers and watched the floor fill up with dancers, the wet coats swinging, the old lamp burning steady above them all.