Black script lettering tattoo on skin, reading Born to bleed, Fighting to succeed, Built to endure and What this world, running down a limb.

Black script quote across a limb

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Five lines of black script lettering run down the skin, reading Born to bleed, Fighting to succeed, Built to endure and What this world, with the top and bottom lines cut off by the frame. The strokes are smooth and even, in solid black ink with no shading or colour. The lines follow the curve of the limb and fill most of the image.

Lettering Other Script Quote Text Word

Find an artist for this

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

The bosun catches you at the rail on the third night out of Gdansk, a brush in your back pocket and a tin of white gloss under your arm. He says the crew want something painted on the forward bulkhead before the ship reaches Montreal. You have been aboard the Corrie Bay for six weeks and nobody has asked you for anything but coffee and rust chippings. He hands you a beer mat with pencil on it: five lines in a hand that leans like it is walking into wind.

Keep reading

You work three nights in the paint store with the lamp swinging, lettering in the curling script your uncle taught you on shopfronts in Leith. The steel is cold and the gloss wants to run, so you thin it, lift it, thin it again. Each line you do in one pull, no going back, because the sea does not wait for second thoughts. Born to bleed goes on first, then Fighting to succeed, and by the fourth morning the deckhands are crowding the passage, mouthing the words as if testing a new engine.

The fifth line is the one that stops you. What this world throws at us has no room left on the plate, so you run it down the curve where the bulkhead bows out, and the letters slant as the ship rolls. The bosun comes to check your work. Carry on, he says, we'll see who drowns first. He laughs, and you realise he wrote the beer mat himself.

When Montreal comes up grey through the fog, the lines are dry and nobody has tidied the edges. The stevedores read them as they come aboard and say nothing. You scrape the brush clean on the rail and watch the words hold their place through every wind the Atlantic has left to throw.