Close photo of a black handwritten script tattoo reading 'i am because you are' with two dates below, on the inner forearm, in Lettering style.

Handwritten script with dates on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's forearm shows a handwritten script line reading 'i am because you are', with two dates set beneath it in smaller black script. The lettering is fine-lined and slightly uneven, as if drawn by hand, and the ink is solid black with no colour. The forearm fills the left and centre of the frame against a green top and a wooden floor, and the woman's face is cropped out.

Lettering Forearm Script Handwriting Quote Date

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind your feet on that step, and don't touch the tiller. The Mary Ann knows her own way through Hopton lock better than you do, and she sulks if you fuss her. Sit down. The kettle's nearly there. You want the story of the logbook, do you? Everybody wants the logbook.

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It was a wet spring the year they replaced the gates on the weir. Young Tom Pelling went over the edge of the lower cut on the first of May, chasing a dropped glove that wasn't worth the trouble, and the current had him under the fender before anyone on the towpath had their boots on. I had the boathook in one hand and my apron in the other. I got a fistful of his collar and held on until Harold came running with the rope. That was the whole of the heroics, though the village has enjoyed improving it since.

Two years on, same weir, same wet May. Harold's boat came down the cut too fast with the mooring pin missing, and her stern swung round against the stone. Who was standing on the bank with a coil of line over his shoulder? Tom, grown into a broad, quiet man who never once mentioned the glove. He threw the line, took a turn round the bollard, and held it while we brought the boat in. Fourteenth of May. I wrote both dates under the lock record, and then, because my hand was shaking and I didn't trust myself with a longer sentence, I added the thing his mother used to say about neighbours: I am because you are.

Pencil, mind. Ink runs in the damp, but pencil keeps. Every spring I still open that book to the first of May before I touch the paddles, and I read it out loud to the water, so it knows who it's dealing with. Now pass me that mug, and I'll tell you what Harold said when he saw the boat.