Black serif lettering tattoo on the inner forearm reading in the end, i want my heart to be covered in stretch marks.

Four-line quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of four centred lines of black serif text tattooed on pale skin, reading in the end, i want my heart to be covered in stretch marks. The lettering is crisp and even, with solid black ink and no colour. The soft background shows the surrounding skin, with a blurred pink and dark fabric edge at the bottom left.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Word Serif

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

The big top has been patched so many times that the canvas looks like a map of other places. You stand under it with a bucket of tent wax in one hand and Mrs Okonedo's ledger in the other, counting the rows of empty benches, while Teddy the clown sleeps on the ring with his hat over his face. The last full house was in March. Nobody warns you that a tent can grow old the way a person does, slowly, along the seams.

Keep reading

Your mother ran the wire act for thirty years. She used to say the canvas was like her: it would stretch for anything and never go back quite where it started. When the rain came through the roof she would laugh and say the tent was only making room. You thought that was nonsense until the spring you found her sewing a new panel into the crown at two in the morning, stitching the old tears with red thread so they showed, and saying nothing about why.

So you take the needle now. You work along the seam while the lamps buzz, and every stitch pulls the fabric tight against the one before, until the whole roof is covered in silver stretch marks, a record of every storm it has survived. The lorry is booked for Tuesday. The bank wants its money. Still you sit in the sawdust with the thread between your teeth and sew, because your mother was right about the important things: the old canvas never shrinks back, it only gets bigger.