Two people with interlocked arms show black script tattoos: Every Saint Has A Past on a woman's forearm and Every Sinner Has A Future on a man's forearm.

Matching Every Saint and Sinner forearm tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people stand close with their arms linked, showing a phrase in black script on each forearm: Every Saint Has A Past on the woman's arm and Every Sinner Has A Future on the man's. The lettering is a thin, slanted serif script in black ink with clean edges and soft grey shading. The man also has a tattoo on his upper arm and a partly visible chest tattoo, and the woman has a small tattoo at the base of her neck, all in black and grey. The photo is framed tightly on the arms and upper bodies, with the woman's face cropped out.

Lettering Forearm Upper arm Chest Neck Phrase Script Couple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Mags had the saying first, scratched into the tiller of the Patience with a darning needle and a bottle of cheap ink. Dev said it sounded like a hymn somebody had dropped in the cut. We were moored below Bingley lock that winter, the two of us and a tabby called Bishop, and the fog came off the water each morning as if it had been waiting to catch us out.

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Dev went to a tattooist in Skipton on a Saturday, a shop above a bakery where the windows smelled of burnt sugar. He came back with his forearm wrapped in cling film and the look of a man who had paid for something he could not return. Mags laughed until she had to sit on the cabin step. Then she rolled up her own sleeve and showed him the matching words she had already booked for the Monday, because she never did anything by halves and he had always known it.

The lock-keeper, a grey man called Alf Pilling who kept a ledger of every boat that passed, noticed the ink before anything else. He copied both sayings into his book under the Patience and underlined the second one twice. Sinners get the future, is it, he said. Saints only get the past. That's a poor arrangement. Mags told him the past was the only part of a saint worth reading, which Alf did not understand, and he wrote that down too.

By March the cut had frozen at the edges and the Patience did not move. Mags was found on the towpath one morning with her sleeve still rolled up and frost on the letters, one hand flat on the ground as if she were reading it. Dev kept the boat. Alf's ledger still lists the Patience as moored, with a line drawn through the name and nothing written after it.