Black handwritten lettering design reading mind above a horizontal line and matter below, drawn on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Mind over matter lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the words mind and matter in a loose, hand-drawn script, with mind placed above a thick horizontal rule and matter placed below it, like a fraction. The linework is solid black with smooth, even strokes and no shading. It is set on a plain white background, centred in the frame.

Lettering Script Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ma, the mate has taken to chalking sums on the back of the galley door, and yesterday he drew one I could not make come right. Three hundred weight of salt pork, nine men, forty days to the Cape, and a barrel that leaks a finger a day. He wrote it as a fraction, the whole problem above a rule and the answer underneath, and told me the answer was not in the numbers at all.

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"Mind over matter, Pim," he said, and tapped the top half. "The bottom is the sea. It does not care what you think of it. The top is you, and you are the only part you can shift."

I told him that was a fine thing for a preacher to say and no use to a cook with a short ration. He laughed so hard he had to sit on the coal box. Then he rubbed the bottom half out with his sleeve, and the top half stayed where it was, and he said that was the trick of it: you could not make the bottom smaller by wanting it, but you could stop dividing by it.

We reached the Cape on the thirty-eighth day. The barrel was dry as a bone by then, because I had moved the pork to the lower hold and wrapped it in sailcloth, and I had counted it every morning on my fingers like a child. I think of him when the light comes off the water in the afternoons. You will say I am soft in the head, Ma, but I have been quite contented.