Black line drawing of a curved banner in lettering style, reading Life's not out to get you, shown in white on a navy background.

Banner with lettering reading Life's not out to get you

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A curved ribbon banner with folded tails is drawn in black outline on a white fill, sitting against a dark navy background. The phrase Life's not out to get you is set in capital letters across the banner, separated by small dots and plus signs. The linework is clean and even, with flat fill and no shading, and the composition is centred with the banner stretching almost edge to edge.

Lettering Banner Ribbon Lettering Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ladder was the third thing to go wrong that morning, after the wasps and the windfalls that split under my boots. Dad had told me to pick the Discovery trees first because they bruise if you so much as look at them, and I had looked at them, and now I was four rungs up with a bucket on my hip and my cuff snagged on a nail.

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He painted signs for half the valley. Feed merchants, the chapel noticeboard, the banner for the August fete that hung between the church gate and the Bell. He liked a ribbon with the tails folded back because, he said, a banner should look like it is carrying something heavy and trying not to drop it. Every spring he laid the lettering out in chalk on the barn floor, dots between the words like pips on a split apple, and every spring I asked what it meant. He'd say, "Life's not out to get you, son. It's just busy."

I did not believe him that morning. The cuff tore, the ladder shifted, and the bucket went one way while I went the other, down into the long grass where the nettles were waiting with their usual opinion. I lay there counting my fingers and listening to the wasps argue over the spill.

Then Dad's boots came round the end of the row, unhurried. He crouched and looked at me the way he looked at a badly mixed black. "Well," he said, "that's one bruised." He picked a Discovery from the grass, turned it in his palm and bit it. Sweet all the way through, not a mark on it. He handed me the other half, and when I'd finished chewing I found I was laughing, and the laughing hurt less than the landing had.