Fine line black tattoo of a dumbbell with the words DON'T GIVE UP above it, on the outer upper arm of a person photographed from behind.

Dumbbell and lettering on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A simple outline drawing of a dumbbell sits on the outer upper arm, with the words DON'T GIVE UP in thin outline lettering above it. The linework is fine and even, with little or no shading. The ink appears mostly dark, with the lettering showing a reddish tint, and the subject is shown against a plain grey top and a wooden door frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrow Court had been out since Tuesday, so Maureen Lusk climbed the fourteen floors with her shopping in one hand and her late husband's dumbbell in the other. Eric had bought it at a car boot sale in 1987 and swore by it for curls while the kettle boiled. Nobody had asked her to keep it. She had simply not been able to put it in the bin with his shirts.

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On the ninth landing the stairwell smelled of bleach and somebody's burnt toast. A boy in a school blazer sat on the step with his phone, one trainer off, hissing at the screen. "It's rubbish," he said, not really to her. "Level forty and I keep dying." Maureen set the bag down. She didn't lecture him. She asked what the game was, and he told her, and she said Eric would have had a view on that.

They talked about nothing much for ten minutes. Bored, he reached for the dumbbell and it nearly pulled him onto the concrete. "Christ, that's heavy." "Twelve kilos. Eric did a hundred presses before breakfast every morning for forty years, and he was never once ill." The boy looked at her as if she had told him a joke he hadn't got yet.

At her door she handed it over, told him to put the phone away and do ten curls before he went down, and then go and find his mates. He laughed, but he did it. The next morning, through the party wall, she heard iron knocking on lino and a young voice counting, slow and stubborn, up to ten. She put the kettle on and, for the first time since March, did not feel she was waiting for anything.

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