Two interlocked forearms show black script lettering reading Every Saint Has A Past and Every Sinner Has A Future, on a person's arm in the foreground.

Matching saint and sinner script on forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people's forearms are pressed together, each carrying a line of black script. One reads Every Saint Has A Past and the other Every Sinner Has A Future, set in a serif-style italic with smooth, even strokes. The image is a close crop on the arms and upper torso, with a tattoo partly visible across the shoulder area and a black top in the background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Couple Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Palais has given up on the waltz, so the floor is a slow scramble of couples shuffling to the last sour note of the trumpet. You stand by the cloakroom with your collar up and watch Ada Marsh pretend she hasn't seen you since Whitsun. Everyone in Hebden Bridge has an opinion about which of you will end up in the canal first. Your father says it will be you. Her mother says it will be you too, and says it louder.

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Ada crosses the floor anyway. She doesn't ask. She takes your wrist and turns it over under the paraffin lamp, as though she is reading a ledger, and says the chapel ladies have already decided what you are. You tell her saints are only sinners who lived long enough to be tidied up. She laughs, which is the worst thing she could have done, and borrows an eyeliner pencil from the girl at the pass-out table to write EVERY SINNER HAS A FUTURE along your arm. Then she lays her own arm against yours, two planks nailed across a bad fence, and says hers will say the opposite, so the town can't get a word in.

Mr Kell's barber shop on Crown Street has a needle that hums like a bluebottle in a jar. On Tuesday afternoon he sets it to work on the pencil lines while the wireless gives out the football results. It takes an hour. Ada doesn't flinch once, though she grips the edge of the chair until her knuckles go white. When it's done she presses her arm to yours and says nobody can call them sinners now, because the sentence is already written and they have to go and find out how it ends.

Your father reads it across the supper table on Sunday and says nothing at all, which in this town is as good as a blessing.