Woman lying on sand with a black hat over her face, showing a small geometric tattoo on her shoulder and the words this too shall pass in fine script on her upper arm.

Geometric shoulder tattoo and script quote

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman lies on sand wearing a white crochet halter top, with a black wide-brimmed hat covering her face. A small geometric design in black ink sits on her left shoulder, and the words this too shall pass are written in thin black script on her upper arm. The image is in colour, but the tattoos are black ink on skin, with the sand and white top providing the main tones.

Fine line Lettering Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Geometric pattern Script Quote Hat Sand

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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

Tobias had cut forty-one letters into the Pendarrow sundial before the vicar asked him to stop and copy out the words the widow had given him on a scrap of paper. He read them again, lips moving, while the wind came off the cliffs and tugged at his apron. This too shall pass. It seemed a strange thing for a woman to want on a sundial, when the whole point of the thing was to count hours that did pass.

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She had come up the lane every morning since the funeral, her boots grey with the chalk dust of the quarry road, and sat on the bench beneath the old beech while he worked. She never said much. Once she brought him a flask of tea with honey in it and watched him chisel the serif of an R until it stood clean. Her husband had been a surveyor who drew hexagons on everything, she told him: field boundaries, the cells of the hives in the orchard, the tiles on the chapel floor. Tobias had thought that a dull sort of man until she showed him the sketchbook.

On the last morning the shadow of the gnomon fell exactly across the words at noon, and she stood up so quickly the bench rocked. She laid one finger on the stone where a small hexagon was scratched beside the date and said that was where he had always stood to take his readings. Tobias packed his chisels into the canvas roll. The hours went on passing, as they were meant to, and the letters held the light the way she had asked them to.