Lettering design of the French phrase Je veux vivre dans mes rêves in a tan italic script on a white background, with no body part shown.

French script phrase in tan ink

Lettering · Colour · Flash

A single line of French text, Je veux vivre dans mes rêves, written in a flowing italic script with a closing full stop. The strokes are smooth and of even weight, with a looped capital J and accented ê. The phrase is centred on a plain white background with generous space around it, and it is set in a warm tan or peach tone.

Lettering Script French text Phrase Calligraphy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The phrase was chalked on the slate above the lamp-room door when I came out to the rock in October, in a hand that pressed too hard, and nobody on the relief boat would say who had written it. Je veux vivre dans mes rêves. I could read it well enough. My mother had made me learn French verbs by the stove in Douarnenez, and the words came back as I hauled paraffin up the iron ladder one rung at a time, counting.

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The keeper before me was Yann Le Goff, who had spent nineteen winters on the rock and talked to the gulls as if they owed him rent. He said the words belonged to a painter from Quimper who had sketched the reef one summer and never came back to collect her easel. She wanted to live inside her dreams, he said, because the real sea was too loud. I thought that was nonsense until the third week of gales, when the wind rattled the glass so hard I stopped hearing the water and heard only my own pulse.

On the last night before the relief, the sky cleared and the beam went round and round, laying its pale arms across the Iroise. I sat with the logbook open and wrote the hours in my neatest hand. Then I took up the chalk and, beneath her line, wrote three words of my own: Moi aussi. When the light swept back past the window, the slate was already catching it, and for a moment both sentences shone.