Black fine line script reading brick by brick on the upper arm, with the arm raised and bent at the elbow.

Brick by brick script on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the words brick by brick written in a joined, cursive script in black ink across the upper arm. The lettering has fairly even, thin strokes with a slight slant, and the phrase runs diagonally up towards the shoulder. The background is plain and pale, with the arm the main subject and a red garment and yellow top visible at the edges.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Text Script Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your father laid the first course of the chapel wall in the spring the pit lost its second shaft, and he did it with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, the way he did everything that year. Mrs Tully from the terrace brought tea out in a jam jar because the cups had gone to the auction. You were nine and carried the bucket of lime up the slope from the cart, slopping it over your boots, and he never once told you to be careful. He only said the thing he always said when the wall looked hopeless: brick by brick.

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Through the summer the wall rose slowly beside the colliery road, and the men walking past on their way to the dole office stopped to watch it more than they watched the headstock. Your father taught you to butter a brick with the trowel, to tap it level with the handle, to read the string line without squinting. Some days he sang. Some days he sat on an upturned bucket with his hands hanging between his knees and said nothing at all, and you learned to wait with him until he stood up again.

By October the chapel had its roof. He died before the first frost, quietly, in the chair by the range, and the wall stood half-finished on the hill with a row of unset bricks waiting for him. You finished it the next spring, one brick at a time, slow and crooked, and when the last course went on you pressed your palm flat against the warm rough face of it and felt the whole village holding still around you.