Black script lettering tattoo reading Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it, Proverbs 4:23, on the back of a lower leg above the ankle.

Proverbs 4:23 script quote on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a black script lettering tattoo on the back of a lower leg, set just above the ankle and under the edge of a lace garment. The text reads Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it, with Proverbs 4:23 in smaller script on the line beneath. The ink is solid black with fine, even linework, and the lettering is centred on the skin with a soft, slightly dim background.

Lettering Calf Script Quote Bible verse

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Oswin had copied the same line forty times before the bell for vespers, and each time his quill had hurried through the last word. The abbot wanted the wisdom verses lettered fair for the new gate, so that carters coming up the valley road would read them before they reached the bell rope. "Above all else," Oswin wrote, then blotted, because his thoughts had already gone down the hill to the spring where the cook drew water and where the goats had been wading.

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He went down at dusk with a lantern and a spade. The spring was a grey pool under the alder roots, churned brown where the goats had stood, and the cook's buckets had come up sour all week. He knelt, lifted out the wet leaves with his hands, and set a flat stone at the lip so the animals drank downstream and the water rose clean behind it. It took until the lantern guttered and his knees had stopped feeling like knees.

In the morning the abbot found him at the gate with ink under his nails and mud to the elbows. He read the board slowly, then tapped the line about the flowing. "Everything you do," he said. "Not everything you are. Do you know the difference?" Oswin said he did not, and the abbot only nodded at the spring, where the water now ran over the stone in a thin bright thread.

Oswin finished the gate that week, cutting the letters deeper than the abbot asked. Travellers stopped to read it and went on. Only the cook ever came back to say the water tasted of nothing at all, which was, she said, exactly how water should taste.