Black and grey photograph of the words One Life One Chance in cursive script tattooed across a person's upper back, with the head and hair cropped at the top of the frame.

One Life One Chance script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads One Life One Chance in a flowing, joined script, with One Life on the upper line and One Chance beneath it. The linework is solid black with smooth, even strokes and no shading, and the lettering runs slightly diagonally across the upper back. The photograph is black and white, with the skin and ink shown against a plain light background.

Lettering Back Script Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gilbert Pellow wanted the words on the pier café's new fascia by Friday, and he wanted them the way his late wife had written the menus, all loops and joins, not the blocky stencil the council allowed now. I told him I could manage a swash hand but not on a board that size in two days. He said I'd done worse for less, which was true, and that he'd pay in cash and a pot of tea.

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So I sat on an upturned crate with a number two sable and a tin of enamel, and I started with the top line because that's where the eye goes first. One Life, the big capital O looping out like a rope paying off a winch. The trouble with a joined hand is that every letter has to lean on the one beside it, and the e in Life wanted to fall over. I kept my breath slow on every stroke, and by teatime the word stood proud of the board.

The second line was the hard part. One Chance had to sit tucked under the first and slope a little toward the sea, as if the words were leaning in to listen. I measured nothing. I let the h in Chance drop below the baseline and felt for the place where it wanted to stop. The paint went tacky in the sea wind, so I worked fast with one hand flat on the wood for steadiness, and the thin strokes went on clean.

Gilbert came out at dusk with his cardigan buttoned wrong and stood under the lamp, reading it aloud with his lips moving. He didn't say it was beautiful. He said, "She'd have said the second line sat too close to the first." Then he took the brush from my hand, dipped it, and added one small flourish at the end of Chance, sure as anything. "There," he said. "Now it looks like her hand, and not yours."