Black handwritten lettering tattoo reading I am the master of my fate and I am the captain of my soul, on a area of skin with lettering style script.

Handwritten quote tattoo on skin

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two lines of black handwritten script tattooed on skin, reading I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. The letterforms are thin, slightly uneven and irregular, in a casual handwriting style. The ink is a dark grey-black with soft edges, and the text fills most of the frame against a pale, lightly textured background.

Lettering Other Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Tennant has made me copy the lines out a hundred times, which is what he does when a boy has put a dead frog in the harmonium. I am on sixty-one. My hand has gone to pieces. The capital letters lean over like they are tired of standing up, and the ink has blotted the bottom of every page because I keep resting my wrist in it. He says a man who can't write his own name properly should at least write someone else's poem properly, so I am doing Henley, who had one foot cut off and wrote about it anyway.

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Mother will be cross about the harmonium but not about the frog, she said so on Sunday. Ned is at sea on the Constance out of Grimsby and has not written since the spring, so I have decided to send him this copybook page when I am done, folded inside his old tin of barley sugar. I have chosen the best line to finish on. It is the one about the captain, because Ned always said he would have his own boat one day and call her something grand. I hope he does not call her the Frog.

Tennant came and stood behind me at half past three with his pipe gone out in his fist. He read the page over my shoulder for a long time. I thought I would get the strap. Instead he took the sixty-first sheet out from under my elbow, held it up to the window so the light came through the thin places in the ink, and said nothing for so long that the clock on the wall had time to tick twice.

He pinned it above his desk when the bell went, beside the map of the North Sea. I am not allowed to take it down. He says a hand that bad will be remembered, and he would rather be remembered for a boy who wrote like that than for the ones who wrote neatly and forgot.