$Black lettering tattoo on the inner forearm reading live, then courage over fear and mind over matter, set out as stacked fractions in a simple sans serif.$

Live, courage over fear and mind over matter

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the inner forearm of a person wearing dark jeans and a dark top. Three word groups are tattooed in black ink: the single word live near the upper arm, courage above a horizontal line over fear, and mind above a line over matter nearer the wrist. The clean, even lettering is set in a plain sans serif, and the shot is taken straight on against a neutral, slightly blurred background.

Lettering Forearm Courage Fear Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the kettle, it's older than my knees. You'll want the story of Morag Lennie, who kept the light on Eilean Dubh the winter the supply boat stopped coming. She kept her accounts the way other women knit, in fractions. Every fact in her book was a top number over a bottom one. Courage over fear, she'd write, and draw her line beneath them as neat as a stitch.

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The night the swell came over the rail, the crew on the landing were shouting at the dark. Morag went down to the generator room with a torch in her teeth and a spanner in her fist. Her hands shook so badly the bolts rattled like teeth. She wrote it up after, mind you, as a sum: one part hands, one part nerve. Her head said the engine would turn, and the engine turned, the iron following her thinking the way a dog follows a whistle. That's the version the old men tell, anyway, and they tell it wrong.

When the boat came back in spring, the clerk from the mainland went through her ledger. Every page was fractions, the bottoms crossed out one by one as the fears were settled, until only the last page was left. There was a single word at the top of it, live, set alone with no line beneath it. Nothing to divide it by, she'd written, and under that, in smaller letters, that she had gone up to see to the lamp.