Black and grey lettering tattoo on the lower back, showing a heart with a peace sign inside and a banner reading What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Heart and peace sign with banner on lower back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's lower back shows a black and grey tattoo of a heart containing a peace sign, with radiating lines behind it. A scrolled banner runs across the design with the words "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger". The linework is bold and the shading is soft grey, with the composition centred on the spine.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind came off the Wash the night the big wheel seized, and Dessa Marr stood under the lights with a spanner in one hand and a paper cup of tea going cold in the other. Her uncle Len had painted a saying on the side of the hook-a-duck stall years back, curling letters on a banner above the prize shelf: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Nobody had looked at it properly since the season the wheel first broke.

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The engineer, a silent man called Bram who smelled of diesel and mint, climbed the hub with a torch clamped in his teeth. Dessa held the ladder and counted the gondolas as they swung overhead, empty and creaking, like a row of lanterns nobody had lit. Somewhere behind the candyfloss van a generator coughed and died, and the whole field went dark except for the wheel's crooked red bulbs.

Bram came down with a fistful of rusted pin. "Your uncle's doing," he said. "Rode it himself every spring, to be sure." Dessa laughed, because Len had also believed the fair would outlast the council and the supermarkets, and it had, only just. She took the pin and rubbed it between finger and thumb until it was warm.

At dawn she climbed the stall steps with a pot of cream paint and a size-two brush. Under the old line she painted a new one in plain capitals: AND SOMETIMES IT JUST BREAKS. Then she sat on the step with her knees up and waited for the first queue of children to come and argue about it.

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