Close photo of black script lettering reading Never Settle along the side of a finger, with the hand resting on a car steering wheel.

Never Settle script on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads Never Settle in a flowing cursive script that runs along the side of a finger. The linework is fine and consistent, in solid black ink with no shading. The hand rests on a black leather steering wheel inside a car, with the dashboard and a gauge cluster in the background.

Lettering Fine line Hand Script Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the envelope on the passenger seat, a pencilled postcode in Wexford and no name on the front, and the queue at Dover has not moved in forty minutes. A gull walks the bonnet of the lorry ahead as if it holds the lease on the lane. You keep your hand on the leather rim and watch the needle hover near the red, because the hire firm warned you about the clutch and because every mile you drive is a mile you could have bought a cheaper way.

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A man in a faded fleece knocks on your window and offers a faster lane for twenty pounds, a shortcut through a depot yard where nobody checks paper. He says everyone takes it. You shake your head and he shrugs, already moving to the next car, as if you have confirmed something about yourself he had guessed. Your finger stings where you have been rubbing it against the wheel. Settling, you used to think, was a kind of rest. Sitting in the heat, you suspect it is only a slower way of stopping.

At the booth the officer turns the envelope over, reads the postcode aloud, and asks if you know what it is. You tell him it is a letter for a woman who taught you to splice rope when you were eleven and too proud to ask twice. He looks at it for a long moment, stamps your passport, and waves you through without opening anything. The lane ahead is empty for the first time all afternoon.

You drop the envelope back onto the seat and pull away, the sea flat and bright beside the road. You let the car find fourth gear on its own. Nothing about the drive is settled yet, and for once that feels like the right way round.