Black ink lettering design reading I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul, with a sunburst above and flourished script, on a textured off-white background.

Lettering quote: master of my fate

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A typographic design with the words I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul set in a mix of condensed capitals and flowing script. A sunburst of radiating lines sits above the first line, and decorative swashes extend from the letters. The artwork is drawn in solid black linework on a pale, speckled background with no body part or colour shown.

Lettering Sunburst Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The board for the Saltcote lifeboat house had been ordered by the wrong committee, so I was up a ladder at six on a Tuesday with a pot of size and a brush I had cut down myself. Mrs Pellow from the chandlery stood below with her arms folded, telling me the sunburst was too much, that folk would think it was a chapel. I told her the sun had been coming up over that water since before any chapel, and she could take it up with the sun.

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I laid out the capitals first, condensed the way my father taught me, measuring each letter against a length of fishing line so the spacing sat true. The script was the hard part. Fate wants a long tail, a swash that runs off the F like a line of spray, and twice I lost my nerve halfway through and wiped the line away with a rag. Up on the ladder, I heard the thing I had heard on the quay all my life: that a man in a boat has no say over the weather. The swash went on anyway, black and steady, and I signed the bottom corner small enough to miss.

When the committee came to see it, Mrs Pellow read the words aloud twice, slowly, the way you read a tide table you don't quite trust. Then she asked who had told me I could decide what the sea did. Nobody had. I had only decided where the paint went. She paid me in cash and a dozen brown eggs, and the next morning the lifeboat went out into the grey, and I stood on the wall watching the sunburst catch the first light over the harbour mouth.