Black cursive script lettering design reading "it is what it is" in three lines on a white background, shown as a stencil-style flash design.

"It is what it is" script lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the phrase "it is what it is" set in three lines of flowing black cursive script on a plain white background. The linework is bold and even, with long looping ascenders and tails that connect the words. It is a monochrome design with no shading, and the lettering is centred within a thin border.

Lettering Script Phrase Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skipper's wife has stopped asking whether the boat will sail. You stand on the Newlyn slip at four in the morning with a flask gone cold in your hand and watch the Marjorie Quay take on water at the stern seam, while Dessie Penhallow rolls a cigarette he will not light and says the thing he always says when the sea turns ugly: it is what it is. You have wanted to hit him for years. This morning you just want to go home.

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The quota is gone, the mackerel have gone deep past the Runnel Stone, and the banks are being hoovered up by Dutch trawlers with lights like a town. Every week the same arithmetic gets done on the back of a fuel receipt, and every week it comes out the same. You haul the nets anyway. Your knuckles crack and bleed a little into the brine, and you tell yourself that what you do with the day is the only part of it that belongs to you.

Out past the bar the fog closes like a lid. The engine coughs, catches, coughs again. You haul a net heavy with nothing but weed and one stubborn dogfish, which you throw back with a curse that surprises you by its gentleness. Dessie watches you from the wheelhouse and does not say a word, and that silence is the first kindness he has shown you since your father died.

Back on the slip at dusk you take the chalk from the bait box and write the words across the wheelhouse door in the same looping hand Dessie uses on the fuel slips, the tails running into each other like rope. He reads it at first light, grunts, and climbs into the cab to start the engine. Neither of you mentions it again, which is, for two men from Newlyn, as close to a poem as the harbour gets.