Black ink lettering reading Head up and move on in a handwritten style, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Head up and move on lettering on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist, showing the words Head up and move on stacked in three lines. The letters use a thin, slightly irregular handwritten-style font with uniform single-line strokes and no shading. The ink is dark blue-black on pale skin, with a plain, soft background and the text centred in the frame.

Lettering Forearm Word Phrase Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fairground at Cardew Green packed up in the rain, and Mabel Tooley stayed behind to count the hoop-la rings that had gone missing. Her father had taught her the trade on a wagon with a squeaking axle, and he had taught her one rule above the rest: never stand still in front of a crowd that wants something from you. Keep your head up, he said, and keep your feet going. The words had been painted in red on the side of the big top, and nobody ever remembered who painted them.

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That autumn a boy came asking for the strongman's lodgings. He had lost his sister to the river at Hexham and had walked three counties looking for the man who had pulled a drowned child out of the Tyne in 1912, and now he wanted a word. Mabel told him the strongman was gone to Ireland and would not be back. The boy sat down on the steps of the caravan and cried the way a grown man cries when he has been holding it in for a year, and Mabel, who had no patience for weeping, found herself fetching him tea without deciding to.

In the morning she gave him the loose change from the ring toss and a pencil stub. He wrote the lines on the back of a playbill, three of them, pressing hard. She held the paper up to the light. Head up, the top line said. Then move on, and under that, only the small word on.

She never told him that the strongman had died in 1931 and that she had made up the trip to Ireland. The boy took the words to a parlour in Newcastle and had them inked on his wrist, and he went home, and he did what they told him.