Black script lettering reading live without regrets, with a swirled flourish beneath, across the upper back.

Live without regrets script across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of black script lettering across the upper back, reading live without regrets, with the leading letter partly cropped at the left edge. A looping flourish sits beneath the words on the right. The ink is solid black with smooth, even strokes, shown against warm skin in a plain, softly lit frame.

Lettering Back Quote Script Flourish Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the island of Scarra, the ferryman Eamon Rourke took his fares in whatever a passenger could spare, and he kept a tally of them in a tin box under the bench. Most paid in coins. Old Mairead Doyle once paid with a lock of her husband's hair, and a young fisher's son paid with a tooth he had lost to a mackerel. The regrets were the currency the island truly wanted rid of, so folk carried them down to the slip in their coat pockets and handed them over quietly with the fare.

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One March, a net-mender called Nell Garrow came down to the slip with nothing in her hands. She had bought a ticket to the mainland in the autumn and never used it. Eamon asked what she would pay. She said she had no coin left and no hair to spare, only the thing she said to herself each night at the window. Eamon told her words weighed more than coins and cost more to carry. She took a stub of charcoal from her apron and wrote on the wet wood of the rail, in a looping hand, live without regrets, then drew a curl beneath it like a wave turning back.

Eamon read it twice and shook his head. The rail was not a ledger, he said, and he would not take a sentence in trade for a crossing. Nell laughed, the first time in a year, and said she had not offered it to buy passage. She had offered it to the island. She stayed on the slip until the tide came up over the planks, then walked the cliff road home past the mill, and found, somewhere near the chapel, that she could no longer name what she had been afraid of. In the morning she took the first boat over and did not come back for three years.

The charcoal faded into the grain within a season, but every spring Eamon goes over the rail with a brush and a pot of tar. He keeps the curl beneath the words exactly as she drew it, so the letters look as though they are running for the boat.