Small black block-capital lettering reading BE PRESENT BE LOVE on the inner wrist.

Be Present Be Love lettering on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand and inner wrist with the words BE PRESENT and BE LOVE tattooed in two short lines of evenly spaced black block capitals. The ink is flat black with no shading, and the wrist is lit by natural daylight. Behind the arm are a blue and white striped dress, a tan bag and a paved pavement.

Lettering Forearm Text Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are seven the summer the nursery at Hollin Bank loses its wireless and gains you instead. Mr Pryce hands you a tin of gloss and a stencil cut from a cornflakes packet, then points at the potting shed lintel with the stem of his pipe. Two lines, he says, and nothing else. You kneel on the warm flags with your tongue between your teeth, dabbing paint through the gaps until the first line comes out crisp: BE PRESENT.

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The second line goes slower. Your hand keeps drifting towards the greenhouse, where the tomatoes are splitting in the heat and his dog sleeps across the doorway like a draught excluder. Every letter has to sit exactly as far from the last as the one before, so you count the gaps under your breath and rub out the smudges with a rag soaked in turps. He passes behind you with a barrow and doesn't look up. "The lintel isn't going anywhere," he says. "Neither is the bee."

You look up. A bumblebee is working the lavender at the edge of the path, dragging its weight from one purple spike to the next, and for a full minute you forget the stencil altogether. When you come back to it, the paint has gone tacky on your thumb and the second line is waiting, BE LOVE, exactly where you left it, as if it had been keeping its place for you.

Forty years later you cut your own stencil from a cereal packet, because some things are better made by hand. You stand on a stepladder at the same shed and steady the card against the old white letters, which have faded to the colour of weak tea. The bee comes back to the lavender. You don't go after it.