Two forearms with black script lettering reading Pain is Inevitable and Suffering is Optional, framed by fine flourishes.

Pain is inevitable quote on forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms show black script lettering, with 'Pain is Inevitable' above and 'Suffering is Optional' below. Fine, flowing linework with decorative swirls and tails surrounds the words. The tattoos are solid black ink on pale skin, and the text is set diagonally across the frame.

Lettering Forearm Quote Script Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ines had been copying the same two lines for eleven days when the foreman came down the ladder to look at her work. The wall of the Halden Vault ran four hundred metres under the ice, and every surface that could hold ink had been claimed by some committee or other. Her brief was the lower band: a single sentence in the old hand, the swashes curling back on themselves like kite tails, to be repainted every decade so the letters would not forget their shape.

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The foreman, a broad man called Osei who had never once read the words aloud, tapped the conduit above them where the hydraulics ran. "Pipe burst on the eastern shaft last winter," he said. "Forty people in the galleries. You want to tell them the suffering part is their choice?"

She did not answer straight away. She dipped the brush, let the excess bead off, and drew the long loop of the capital P in one unbroken stroke, the way her teacher had shown her with a wet sponge on a slate. Her hand was steady because she had decided long ago that steadiness was the only part of the job she controlled.

"They're not the sentence," she said. "The sentence was written by someone who'd had a worse winter than yours." She stepped back and tilted her head at the lower line. "Read the second half again. The bit about choosing. It isn't a promise. It's a door they left open for us."

Osei looked for a long time, then climbed back up the ladder without a word, and Ines heard his boots stop on the third rung, as if he had remembered something he meant to say and decided against it.