Fine line black script tattoo reading choose joy with a small cross on the inner wrist, shown with the palm facing up.

Choose joy script on inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of an open palm showing a black script tattoo on the inner wrist that reads choose joy, followed by a small cross. The thin, evenly weighted linework has a loose, handwritten feel and the ink is solid black with no shading. The warm-toned phone photo has bright highlights on the palm against a dark fabric background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Cross Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first morning, Mrs Harrow hands you a head torch and a bucket of pellets and says the ewes in the top field won't wait for anyone's feelings. Frost has stiffened the gateposts. You learn to break the skin of ice on the trough with the heel of your boot, and to count the flock by their breath before you count them by sight. By the back door there is a slate on a nail, and on it, in a looping hand gone faint with weather, are two words and a small cross: choose joy. You assume it's a saying for the chapel tea crowd. Nobody in this valley has been joyful since the lane flooded in November.

Keep reading

In the third week a ewe goes down in the drifts during the night, and you find her at four in the morning with her legs folded under her and a lamb half born and not moving. You kneel in the straw of the lambing shed with a bucket of warm water going cold beside you. You rub the little body with a handful of hay, harder than feels kind, until it coughs and shakes its ears like a wet dog. Mrs Harrow stands in the doorway in her husband's coat, her breath clouding the lamp light. She doesn't come in. She just says, "Well. Go on then," and goes back to the house to put the kettle on.

At seven you come down with frozen hands and find the chalk on the windowsill where she always leaves it. You stand in front of the slate for a long time. Then, under the old words, in letters that wobble in the cold, you write the date, one lamb, and a word that is not quite joy but is close enough to it to be going on with.

When you step back, the frost on the slate has begun to thaw from the bottom edge upwards, and the cross is the first thing to show through.