Black ink drawing of the hand-lettered words and if not he is still good, framed by a wreath of leaves, ferns and small flowers, shown as a design with no body placement.

Hand-lettered quote in a leafy wreath

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of the handwritten phrase "and if not He is still good" set in the centre of an oval wreath. The wreath is made of fern-like sprigs, pointed leaves, small five-petalled flowers and a few tiny sparkle marks, drawn in fine, even linework with light stippling. The image is monochrome on a pale grey background, and the lettering is the clear focal point.

Lettering Botanical Quote Script Wreath Leaves Fern Sprig Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the both of you, and mind the dust on the step. This is the road out past Caddon Flats, where the tar gives up and the sand takes over, and I'll tell you about the carter Eli Harrow, who drove it with a cart of salt and a boy called Tobit asleep in the straw. The axle went at the second dry well, snapped clean like a dead stalk.

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Tobit wanted to cry. Eli didn't. He went to the back of the cart and pulled out the old slate his mother had hung on the wagon hook, the one with a border of ferns she'd scratched round its edge with a nail. Across the middle, in her careful hand, she'd written: and if not. Eli read it out the way you'd read a bill. 'Then the road is still a road,' he said, 'and the water is still down there somewhere.' He cut tamarisk from the scrub, bent the sprigs into a ring and lashed it to the broken axle with his belt.

They walked three days. On the second night the boy looked up through the ring of tamarisk, gone brown and stiff but still holding its shape, and asked whether they would die. Eli said he didn't know. He said the slate had never promised them the road would be short, only that somebody would keep walking it, and tonight that somebody was them.

They found the well on the third morning, its rope frayed and its bucket rusting, with a fresh green ring hung on the gatepost by a keeper neither of them ever met. Tobit kept the slate. The nail marks have worn pale now, but he can still trace the ferns with his thumb.