Black script lettering reading Life Goes On, with soft grey shading, tattooed across the back of a hand.

Life Goes On script across the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the back of a hand, with the words Life Goes On set in flowing black script lettering across the knuckles and back of the hand. The letters have bold, swirling strokes with some shading behind them that gives the design depth. The photograph is taken against a plain light background, with the ink as the clear focus.

Lettering Hand Script Lettering Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorrie Penhallow had lettered shopfronts along the harbour at Staithes for thirty-one years, and she could tell a nervous hand from the far side of the quay. The lad who came in on a wet Tuesday had a sketch folded to the size of a bus ticket, the words drawn twice in pencil, the second version leaning further right than the first. "Can you make them climb?" he asked. She took the sketch to the window and turned it slowly in the grey light, the way her father used to check a board before he'd let anyone touch it.

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She held the job for a week because she did not care for the last word. Goes meant walking off down the road, and it was the sort of thing men wrote on a stone when they had given up on the rest of the sentence. Her father had painted LIFE across the window of the Bell in 1962, the autumn the Maud went down off Flamborough with four men aboard, and he never finished the second word. The ale ran short, the brush dried stiff on the sill, and the gap stayed bare for a decade until someone else's sign covered it.

On the Saturday she came back with a fine brush and a tin of sepia enamel. She laid in the long down-strokes first, loops that lift like a wave before it breaks, then closed the O of Goes in a single breath so it would not wobble. "It isn't sad," she told him when he asked, squinting at the tail of the last letter. "It's something you keep doing with your hands while you're still stood in the road."

He paid her in coins counted out on the bench, and he did not look at the lettering once. He looked past her through the open door at the grey water coming in over the slipway, and Dorrie wiped the brush on her apron and let him.