Black and grey photograph of two wrists, each with a lettering tattoo: Life's too SHORT to worry on the left and Life's too LONG to wait on the right.

Matching quote tattoos on two wrists

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two wrists are shown side by side in a black and white photograph. The left wrist has the words Life's too SHORT to worry in mixed serif and slab lettering, and the right wrist has Life's too LONG to wait in a similar mix of typefaces. The black ink is crisp and solid, and the words are set on a slight diagonal across each wrist.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Quote Text Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tea had gone cold on the tiller by the time Dot looked up from the lock book and announced that life was too short to fret over a leaking gunwale. I told her it was too long to spend patching the same plank every winter, and we carried on like that from Reading to Sonning, the way we had since our father left us the Marigold and a debt nobody had bothered to explain.

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Dot wanted to sell at Brentford. She had a buyer with a flat in Kew and a sense of humour about barges. I wanted to wait. Not for the money, though I'd have liked some, but for the spring water, when the river runs high enough to take the Marigold through the old cut at Hurley without scraping her bottom on the gravel. Dot said waiting was what Dad had done, and look where it got him, which was a wet grave in Marlow and a tin of biscuits full of unpaid bills.

We reached Hurley lock at dusk with the light gone thin and grey. The lock keeper, a bald man called Eamon who had known our father for forty years, came down the steps with a torch and handed Dot a ledger. Inside the back cover, in Dad's square capitals, was a column of dates, each one a passage through this lock on the spring flood, each with a single word beside it. Most said WAIT. Three said GO.

Dot read it twice, then passed it to me. Our two sets of words caught the torchlight as we bent over the windlass together, the old lettering crooked across the ink. We worked the gates until the water settled, and when the Marigold rose in the chamber, Dot laughed and said the thing she had always said. I said it back, and for once we meant the same thing.