Black handwritten script reading Inhale the future, exhale the past, drawn as a fine line tattoo design on a white background.

Inhale the future, exhale the past script

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

Two lines of cursive handwriting in black ink read Inhale the future, exhale the past, with the second line indented beneath the first. The strokes are thin, even and single-weight, with no shading or fill. The text sits centred on a plain white background with no other elements.

Lettering Fine line Script Quote Handwriting

Find an artist for this

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

They held the reunion in the old infants' hall, because the school had never been sold and nobody in Harrowby could think of anywhere else to put forty people who had once shared a playground. Mrs Pell brought her tea urn. Tom Gadd brought a box of chalk he said he had found under the stage, and he wrote on the blackboard a sentence he had carried since 1979, though he could not say where he had first heard it. Inhale the future, exhale the past, in joined-up letters, with the second line set in under the first.

Keep reading

Nobody laughed. Dorothy Vane, who had sat behind Tom and pulled his hair every Tuesday, stood up slowly and said that in her experience a person could not breathe in what had not happened yet. Tom said that was the trouble with her. She said the trouble with him was that he had never once let a thing out. Then the two of them were quiet, and the urn ticked as it cooled, and somebody opened the high windows.

The people of Harrowby have a saying now about that hall. If you stand under the board at the end of an evening and draw one long breath, the older you feel comes out of you like steam off a cup, and the younger you feel goes down into your chest and stays there. Dorothy swore it was nonsense. She was seen at the windows the next morning all the same, breathing in so hard her shoulders lifted, then letting it go in a rush that fogged the glass.

Tom rubbed the board clean with his sleeve, but the sentence had sunk into the slate where the chalk pressed, and it is still there, faint as a breath on a cold pane, for anyone who stands in the right place and reads it aloud.