No retreat no regrets on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photo of a forearm and wrist bearing two lines of small black text, set in a typewriter-style font, reading no retreat no regrets. The lettering has crisp, even black linework with no shading or colour, and the text sits diagonally across the skin. A hand with red nail polish holds a white Starbucks coffee cup on the right, while a couch and a dim room fill the background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Typewriter font Coffee cup Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice had come down the Trent overnight, grinding along the hull like something wanting in, and by six the Mary Ellen sat fast in a field of grey plates. Uncle Tom climbed aboard with the post buttoned inside his coat. There was a letter from the lock-keeper at Gunness and another from a man in Hull who wanted to buy the barge for scrap and pay in cash, which Tom had already decided was a good offer.

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I had the typewriter out before he finished talking. It lived on a folded blanket on the chart table, its keys gone pale in the middle from forty years of Dad's thumbs and then mine. I rolled a clean sheet in and pushed the carriage back so the bell rang out over the frozen water, and Tom flinched as if I'd fired something.

I typed the reply short, the way Dad taught me. The Mary Ellen is not for sale. She has carried coal, cement and once a grand piano up this river, and she will carry whatever comes next. Tom read it over my shoulder, lips moving, and when he reached the bottom he said nothing for a long while, just watched the kettle's steam curl past the window.

Then I typed the line Dad used to write at the foot of every sheet that mattered, the one he said he'd learned from a sergeant who never came home: no retreat, no regrets. I pressed my thumb to the wet ink, still warm from the mug at my elbow, and handed the page to Tom. Outside, somewhere up the reach, the ice gave a long, low crack, and the barge settled a fraction deeper into her berth, as if she'd decided too.