Black handwritten script reading 'This too shall pass.' on a plain white background, a lettering design suited to a fine line tattoo.

Handwritten 'This too shall pass' lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the phrase 'This too shall pass.' written in black, loose cursive handwriting on a plain white background. The linework is thin and even, with a fine stroke and no shading or fill. The text sits horizontally across the centre of the frame with generous white space around it.

Lettering Fine line Script Handwriting Phrase Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the note in February, when the Maud Ellen is hauled out on the slip at Scarholm and the fleet sits quiet under its tarpaulins. It is folded into quarters and pushed behind the tally board in the net loft, the paper gone soft as cloth. The hand is loose and sloping, the same one that signed off your grandfather's catch returns for forty years. The paper is the back of a fuel receipt from 1979, the ink browned at the edges, and across it, in a line that runs slightly downhill, someone has written: This too shall pass.

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You remember the winter of the bad boats, when three crews failed to come back past the Skerries and the harbour wives stood on the wall in their good coats and nobody sang in the Anchor that month. Your grandfather would not go out for a fortnight. He sat in the loft mending twine with his big hands, and when you cried over a lost pot he said those same words to you, and you thought they were the sort of thing a vicar says over a grave.

You fold the receipt back along its creases and put it in your breast pocket, because it seems wrong to leave it where the damp can get at it. Down on the slip a lad is shouting for more white, and the first boat of the season has its new coat half on, the bright red of it climbing over the old grey like a tide coming in.

You take the brush from the tin and dip it. The first stroke goes on wet, and where the grey still shows through beneath it, you leave it be.