Close-up of black cursive lettering reading we see things they'll never see across a pale forearm, in a lettering style.

Cursive quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a line of black cursive script running diagonally from the wrist towards the elbow. The letterforms have a fluid, hand-written feel, with some words drawn slightly heavier than others and the final words partly cropped at the edge of the frame. The skin is pale against a soft, neutral background with an out-of-focus fabric sleeve.

Lettering Forearm Quote Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Cross could say who had first painted the words above the ferry-house door, only that the board had been repainted every spring since the war by whoever held the rope. Tom Pardoe took the rope in 1953 from his father, who had taken it from his. Each morning he read the line before he untied the boat, the way other men checked their pockets for keys. We see things they'll never see.

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The fog came up off the Lune one November so thick that the church tower went first, then the far bank, then the hand on the tiller. A woman called from the mud. She was Ruth Fenwick, the schoolteacher, who had missed the last bridge and had nowhere else to be. Tom pushed out anyway. He could not see the water, but he knew the sound of the current against the second post, and he steered by that.

Halfway across she asked him what the sign meant. He said his father had told him it was about the ferryman's eyes, that a man who rows one river long enough learns to see what strangers cannot. She laughed and called it a boast. He agreed that it was.

They grounded at the slipway where the lamp hung. Ruth climbed out and turned back, and in the yellow light he saw she was half-amused and half-thoughtful. "Who's it written for, then?" she asked. Tom looked up at the board, the paint flaking at the edges of the last words, and reckoned the answer was whoever had the nerve to be out on the water with him.