Black handwritten script design reading live to better the lives of others on a plain white background.

Handwritten quote about living to better others

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a handwritten phrase in black ink that reads live to better the lives of others, with the words flowing into one another across three lines. The linework is a single uniform weight with brush-like tapering on the strokes and no shading. The design is in black on a plain white background with no colour and no body part visible.

Lettering Quote Script Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, you're making the chairs nervous. Leave the kettle, it's had its day same as me. You want the one about Nurse Agnes Pell and the men's surgical ward with the clock that ran backwards? Right then.

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It was the winter of the big frost, and Sister had gone home with her chest, so Agnes was on her own from midnight to six with twenty-two beds and one bad lamp. She kept a pencil stub behind her ear and wrote everything down on the back of her hand, because paper got soaked and hands at least stayed where you put them. Old Mr Teale in bed nine wanted his pocket watch wound. The lad from the canal in bed fourteen wanted somebody to tell his mother he was warm. Agnes wrote both on her knuckles and went about it in order.

Then Dennis the porter came up one night with a tin from the lost property cupboard. Inside, under a rubber band and a bus ticket from 1931, was a scrap of card with a line in careful joined-up writing: live to better the lives of others. Nobody knew whose it was. Dennis thought it was the sort of thing people put on tea towels. Agnes read it twice and said nothing, and then she took the card back to the ward and propped it against the lamp so she could see it while she worked.

By dawn the ink on her hand had smudged into one long grey word, and she couldn't have told you which name was which any more. Mr Teale's watch was ticking. The lad in fourteen was asleep with his mother's cardigan pulled up to his chin, and his mother was sitting in the chair by the window with her eyes shut, looking warm enough. Agnes let the smudge be. Off you go now, the bus will be along.