Black handwritten-style lettering tattoo on the upper arm reading a quote in quotation marks, with an attribution line beneath it, in a lettering style.

Handwritten quote tattoo on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a short quotation in quotation marks, reading "its is my life", with a tilde and a name, "Jon Bovi", on a second line beneath it. The letters have a loose, hand-drawn look with uneven, medium-weight black linework and no shading. The text sits across the skin of the upper arm against a plain background, with the edge of a dark top visible at the left.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Lettering Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dessie Loach painted the words on the cabin side of the Hester May the week before she left Cricklade for the long pull down to Oxford. He worked freehand with no chalk line, his tongue caught in the corner of his mouth the way it always was when he concentrated. Ruth Pell, the owner, had picked the quote herself off a beer mat in the Swan. Under it she wanted a name, so Dessie wrote Jon Vell, which was the name printed on the same beer mat.

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I read it over his shoulder that morning and said nothing, because nobody on the towpath thanks a man for correcting someone holding a brush. "its is my life," I said eventually. Dessie shrugged. "Paint's cheaper than a second coat, Tam, and the boat won't be reading it aloud."

Ruth spotted the mistake at the first lock and laughed for a full mile. She told the lock-keeper at Bablock Hythe that she had hired the finest sign-writer on the Thames and he had given her a sentence with a hole in it. She never asked for it to be fixed. By the time she sold the boat, half the crews on the river knew the Hester May by her cabin side before they knew her name.

The paint finally went in a hard summer, flaking away in grey curls until only the "my life" was left, and the new owner had a signwriter in from Abingdon to tidy the boat up. I stood on the bank the morning the new lettering went on, perfectly spelt, perfectly straight. It looked like a sentence somebody had finished. I missed the old one, the way you miss a friend's mispronunciation after they've learnt the proper word.