Black outline tattoo of the words Don't dream it, be it in serif capitals with swirling flourishes, on the inside of a forearm near the wrist.

Don't dream it, be it quote on the forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads DON'T DREAM IT, BE IT in bold serif capitals, with the line of text framed by curling scroll flourishes above and below. The linework is a single consistent black outline with no shading, filling most of the frame against pale skin. The composition is centred on the inner forearm, photographed straight on against a plain light background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Flourishes Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, because my voice has gone to gravel and I will not shout this tale for the benefit of the back benches. In the kingdom of Caddery Vale, which you will not find on any map a clerk has drawn, there lived a sign-painter named Orla Venn who could letter a shop front so finely that pigeons stopped to read it and flew off improved.

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One spring the Harrowgate Players came rattling over the bridge with a painted cart, a bear that could not dance, and a girl called Pell who had only ever wanted to stand under the lamps. Pell climbed the ladder to Orla's workshop and asked for a board for the playhouse door. What should it say, Orla asked. Pell had read a scrap of playbill nailed to a barn, and the words had lodged in her like a fishbone: Don't dream it, be it. Orla snorted and said dreams were cheap as turnips in autumn. She would paint the words, she said, but only once Pell showed her what being it looked like.

So Pell did. All summer she played the wicked queen in the market square, the drowned miller, the heron that stood on one leg in the reeds, and each evening she came back to the workshop with ink on her cheek and fresh bruises from the cobbles. Orla painted the letters thick and plain, then curled a scroll above and below them, so the words had room to breathe and the eye would not rush past. Pell watched every stroke and said nothing, which was how Orla knew the thing had finally been got right.

The board still hangs above the playhouse door in Caddery Vale. The gilt has gone to brown and the bear has long since retired, but if you stand beneath it on a wet afternoon you will see the flourishes still curling, and a smaller line in the corner that Orla painted the night Pell left for the coast. Go on, then, it says.