Black fine line script tattoo reading "Fate fell short" on the upper chest near the collarbone, with a navy polka dot top visible at the edge of the frame.

"Fate fell short" script on upper chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows the words "Fate fell short" in a flowing cursive script, with the word fate and fell joined in a single sweeping line. The linework is thin and even, rendered in black ink with no shading or colour. The tattoo sits horizontally across the upper chest just below the collarbone, with the skin softly lit and a navy polka dot top at the right edge.

Lettering Fine line Chest Script Quote Word

Find an artist for this

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

Nell had trimmed the wick at four, the way Ansel had taught her before the fever took him, and she was still at the glass when the boat came round the Skerry with its sail shredded to ribbons. She counted the men on the thwarts twice. Five. Tom had promised he would be the sixth, that the herring were running thick under the cliffs and a boy with good eyes was worth an extra ha'penny on a shares crew.

Keep reading

The lamp had been burning since dusk, its beam sweeping the black water in a pale arc she had never once thought of as a sentence. Ansel used to say the sea kept its own accounts and never rounded anything down. He had written the Admiralty's rules in the front of the log in his square capitals, then underlined the last line himself: a light is only as good as the hand that trims it. She had always thought that was a comfort. Tonight it sounded like a sum that did not come out.

The second boat reached the slip at half six. Jem Crane sat in the bow with his hands wrapped in a torn shirt and said the sea had come over the gunwale at the Ness, that Tom had gone after a floating oar and the others had hauled him back in, and then he had simply not come up again. Jem kept saying it in the same flat voice, as if repeating it might make the words arrive in a different order.

Nell climbed the stairs at first light and opened the log. Beneath the day's entry, in her own cramped hand, she wrote Tom's name. Then she wrote the words Ansel had never got round to finishing, long and looping across the page, and let the lamp burn on until the gulls came up off the rocks to see what she was doing.