Fine line lettering reading TOUGH ENOUGH in orange, teal, purple, green and yellow on the upper arm of a person in a striped top.

Multicoloured TOUGH ENOUGH lettering on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo spells out the words TOUGH ENOUGH in two lines of capital letters, each drawn as a thin outline in a different colour. The letters are evenly spaced and set against plain skin, with a slightly soft-focus background of a blurred interior. The photograph is taken at an angle, so the arm and lettering fill the left and centre of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Lettering Text Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pell had the hull plate on the bench under the lamp for three days before she let herself read it properly. Someone had painted the words in two lines across the scuffed alloy, each letter outlined in a different colour, the way the old signwriters on Meridian Deck used to work before the paint stocks ran dry. TOUGH on top. ENOUGH beneath, the O sitting a fraction lower than the rest, as if the painter had been leaning on the tail of a long shift.

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Nobody on the ring knew who had written it. The manifests listed the plate as a spare from the second spin, cut for a coolant junction that had long since been scrapped. Pell traced the blue outline of the T with a fingernail. The line wobbled at the top, then steadied, as though whoever held the brush had made up their mind halfway through.

Her supervisor, Oyelaran, wanted it cleaned and logged. Pell wanted to know who had needed to tell themselves that, and why they had chosen to say it in seven colours where plain grey would have served.

She cleaned the plate around the letters only. On the last evening she took a fine brush and, very carefully, filled the gap where the G had flaked, matching the green from a tin she had been saving for something she could not name. Then she hung the plate back on its hook above the filtration racks, where light from the observation port would fall across it at morning, and she went home without writing the log entry.