Black ink lettering tattoo reading know your own happiness, with scrolled flourishes above and below, on the upper arm of a person in a denim vest.

Know your own happiness quote on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A serif script quote reads know your own happiness, with a curling scroll above and a small ornamental motif below. The lines are dark and even, with solid letterforms and no shading. The arm is shown in profile against a plain white background, with the tattoo sitting on the upper arm just below the shoulder.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Script Flourish Scroll Text Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tobias Quarrie kept the lamp on Scarth Rock for thirty-one winters, and he never once went ashore at Hallow Cove to buy anything he did not need. The villagers thought him stingy. He thought them busy, which was not the same thing, and when the mainland ferry brought his oil and his letters he read the letters at the table with the lamp still unlit beside him.

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The year his brother drowned off the Skerries, a woman came out on the supply boat with a trunk of books. She was the widow of a glass-maker from Penzance, she said, and she meant to stay until the spring tides. She wanted to paint the gallery rail. Tobias let her, because the rail needed it, and because she did not ask him how he felt. Each evening she sat on the step with a tin of blue paint and a fine brush, and each evening she lettered a single line in the flaking iron of the lantern housing, in small careful capitals the salt could not reach.

On the last night before she left, he climbed up to read the words by the light he had just lit. They were not a verse. They were four words in a curling hand, the kind a printer uses for wedding cards: know your own happiness. He stood there until the beam swung round over the water, and the boats coming home saw it, and he understood that she had not been speaking to him at all, but to the rock, and to whoever would climb up after him.