Colour lettering tattoo reading Do what you LOVE What you do, with a yellow basketball replacing the O, a blue butterfly and a music note, in a mixed black and colour style.

Do what you love lettering with basketball

Lettering · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo spells out the phrase Do what you LOVE What you do in bold black lettering, with the O in LOVE replaced by a yellow basketball marked with the number 21. A blue butterfly sits at the upper left and a small black music note appears at the lower right. Black outlines and shading sit alongside the yellow and blue colour, and the design fills the frame against plain skin.

Lettering Quote Butterfly Music note

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The man at booth four set a basketball on my counter as though it were a second passport. It was scuffed yellow, with a 21 inked on one panel, and he kept one hand flat on it while I flicked through his documents. When I asked the purpose of his visit, he said he was going to Lisbon to play a summer league for men who had mostly stopped believing they were still any good. His daughter had packed the ball herself, he said, so he would remember which way was up.

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The ball had been signed along its seams in careful capitals: DO WHAT YOU LOVE. Someone else had added, in a looser hand, WHAT YOU DO, as if the first half needed a grown-up to finish it. Tucked behind the passport was a sheet of hand-copied music, the bars crossed out and rewritten so many times the paper had gone soft. I asked him if he played the piano. He said no, that the music was his brother's, and that he was taking it to a man in Porto who might know what to do with it.

I stamped the page and slid it back under the glass. He picked up the ball, then paused, because a small blue butterfly had come in through the open hatch and settled on the 21, opening and closing its wings as if it were checking the paperwork. He laughed, a short surprised sound, and I told him it was the first thing that had gotten past my desk all morning. He tucked the ball under his arm and walked out into the grey light. The butterfly stayed where it was for a long while after he had gone.