Close photo of the word COURAGE above FEAR in lettering split by a horizontal line on the wrist, with part of a leaf tattoo visible above it.

Courage and fear lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows the word COURAGE set above the word FEAR, separated by a thin horizontal line, across the inside of a wrist. The letters use a simple outlined lettering style in a single reddish-brown ink. A dark leaf design, partly cropped at the top of the frame, sits above the lettering against a wooden background.

Lettering Forearm Courage Fear Lettering Text Leaf

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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

Mind the step, it's been missing since the Jubilee and nobody on the council has got round to it. Come on, you'll get your breath back on the landing. Sit down. I'll tell you about the summer Maureen Pilling wrote on her arm with a biro.

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Fourteen floors up, Hollins House, and every lift broken the same week. Maureen had a boy at the top called Terry who wouldn't come down past the balcony rail since his dad went. She climbed those stairs every night with a flask and a bag of chips and sat on the cold concrete with him. One night she came down grey as the stairwell and asked Harold in the caretaker's cupboard for a pen.

He gave her the blue biro from his top pocket, the one with the teeth marks. She sat on the bottom step, wrote COURAGE across the inside of her wrist, then FEAR underneath, and drew a line between them with the edge of her thumbnail. Harold asked what she was doing. She said she wanted to see which side of the line she was standing on before she went up again.

Terry came down the stairs himself that week. Nobody saw him decide. Maureen said it was the ink that did it, which was rubbish, but she kept the biro and she kept the line. Years on, when people asked, she'd roll her sleeve up and tap the line with one finger. Feel that, she'd say, it's not a wall. It's just where you put your foot.