Black lettering reading Go Your Own Way across a forearm, with waiting room chairs and a checkered floor behind.

Go Your Own Way lettering on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is the words GO YOUR OWN WAY written across the inner forearm in a flowing black script with long, sweeping tails on some letters. The linework is solid black with no shading, and the image is entirely black and grey. The arm fills the upper middle of the frame, with a blurred view of a room of chairs and a checkered floor below.

Lettering Forearm Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ivor had the brush loaded with lamp black when the girl came up the slip with her mother's cardigan over one arm and a rolled chart under the other. "You're meant to be sweeping," he said, not looking up. Dora said the sweeping was done. He let the tail of the Y finish its long drop across the board before he asked what she wanted.

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She wanted words on the transom of her uncle's coble, the one that had sat rotting in the Bass shed since the winter. Her uncle had said the boat would go to whoever could make her float, and the new owner could choose her name. Ivor pointed out that a boat without a name was bad luck. Dora said she had already chosen, and turned the chart over. On the back, in pencil, someone had written a phrase in a hand so careful it looked like a diagram: GO YOUR OWN WAY, with the G swung down under the line like a hook.

Ivor had painted the Maud Ellen, the Kittiwake and eleven other names he could no longer picture, always in the same lettering, gold leaf on black, the old way. He did not care for a phrase on a hull. It sounded too much like advice. But he saw the tails had been drawn with a steady wrist, and he knew her uncle's hand, the same hand that had taught him to pull a line forty years ago.

He mixed the gold. They worked until the tide turned, Ivor laying the first flourish while Dora held the lamp steady over the board. When he stepped back, the words ran the length of the transom, the last tail of the final Y curling past the edge as if it meant to leave the wood altogether. "He'll have to take it out on the water," Ivor said. "Nobody paints a tail like that to stay put."