Black and grey photograph of a fine black script quote tattooed along the upper arm of a person whose face is not shown.

Black script quote along an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph shows a long line of cursive script tattooed along the upper arm, running from near the shoulder towards the elbow as the arm is folded across the body. The lettering is thin and even, with solid black ink and no shading, and the skin is lightly freckled around the tattoo. The composition is close and cropped, with the person's torso and loose hair visible and a dark cat-printed top in the lower half.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Script Text Cursive

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was late again, so I sat on the sea wall with the post sack between my boots and copied out the line for Tomas, the way he had asked me to, in my best hand. He had seen it pinned to a noticeboard in a café in Oban and carried it about with him ever since, he said, like a pebble in his coat. I told him it sounded like something a man says before he has learnt what a lifetime costs. He laughed and asked me to write it anyway.

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I wrote everything for the island in those days. The school had taught us copperplate, and the mainland people said you could tell a Harris hand from a Lewis one by the loops alone. Tomas crewed on his uncle's boat and came up to the post office every Tuesday with his letters for Glasgow, always unsealed, always apologising for the smell of bait on the paper. I never read them. I only weighed them and counted the stamps.

The Tuesday boat went out without him that week. The wind got up on the Wednesday and stayed up until Saturday, and when the sea finally lay down, his uncle's boat was found on the skerry with its hatch open and nothing aboard but creels. In the back of the last envelope he had left on my counter, under the stamp, was the line written out again in his own careless capitals, and a note asking me to post it to the address in Oban when the weather turned.

The weather turned on a Monday. I weighed the envelope twice, pressed the stamp down with my thumb, and stood in the cold doorway watching the ferry bell swing as the gangplank came down. I put it in the sack myself, and it sank to the bottom where the others could not see it.