Black ink quote tattoo in a gothic-style serif on the inner upper arm, reading I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.

Poem quote along the inner upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A two-line quotation is tattooed in black ink along the inner upper arm of a light-skinned arm that is bent and raised. The lettering is a condensed gothic-style serif, set slightly angled and sharply edged with solid fill. The plain light background and grey sleeve keep the focus on the text.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, because Mrs Hebden's urn has been going since seven and I'll not be shouted over by it. You all remember the year the sports hall roof came down in the gale. I remember it because that was the winter Dougie Finch promised his nan he'd walk the old drover's road to Hexham with a tin of her rhubarb and ginger jam for her sister Agnes, before the thaw. Dougie had never walked further than the bus shelter in his life, and he went off up the lane with a rucksack, a torch with two batteries left in it, and a face like a man going to the dentist.

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By dark the snow had come sideways over the fells and the stiles were iced like sweets. He lost the path twice. He was sitting on a wall with the torch dying, eating a biscuit so he wouldn't have to think, when he heard a dog bark somewhere below. He told me later he was that cold he started saying the poem out loud, the one Miss Calloway made us learn in Year Nine, the one about the snowy woods. He got as far as the bit about promises to keep and miles to go before sleep, and he said it over and over, like a rope he was pulling himself along.

He got to Agnes's gate at four in the morning. The house was dark. He knocked anyway, and eventually a light came on in the window, and there she was in her dressing gown with a poker in one hand, looking at this boy covered in snow with a tin held out in front of him like a ticket. She said he was a daft article. Then she took the tin, opened it on the spot, and ate a spoonful with her fingers. Dougie fell asleep in her chair before she'd even put the kettle on. Some promises are small, but you keep them anyway.