Two arms crossed over each other, each with matching black lettering reading (it's alright), one on the upper arm and one on the forearm.

Matching (it's alright) lettering on two arms

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two arms are crossed in front of a dark background, and each carries the same short phrase in black lowercase lettering with parentheses around it. The upper example sits on the upper arm and the lower one on the forearm, both in a thin, even, slightly cursive sans-serif style. The skin tones are warm and the photograph is taken indoors with a phone, so the ink reads as a single dark grey-black tone against the skin.

Lettering Upper arm Forearm Text Phrase Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell found the note on the back of a gas bill, folded into the teapot, in her sister's looping hand: (it's alright), with the brackets drawn carefully round it as though the words might wander off if left bare. Pat had written it the night the boiler died and the flat went cold enough to see their breath over the kettle.

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They had argued about the brackets for years. Pat said they made the thing sound like an aside, something you could step around if you didn't want to hear it. Nell said that was the point. Their mother had used the phrase on the phone from the hospital in Bradford, always in that small careful voice, and both of them had learned to hear the parentheses in it, the hedge tucked at the edge of the sentence where the real meaning lived.

Next morning Nell took the number 56 across the river to the depot where Pat worked the late cleaning rota, and she sat on an upturned crate by the lockers until Pat came off shift. They did not talk about the boiler. They talked about a stray collie that had followed a bin lorry the length of Kirkgate, and Pat laughed until she had to lean against the wall and wipe her eyes with the back of a rubber glove.

That evening Nell took a biro and wrote the phrase again on the inside of her own arm, brackets and all, to see how it sat. Then she put her arm down beside Pat's on the sofa, so the two lines of ink lay in the same yellow lamplight, and neither of them bothered to read it out loud.