Close-up of a black script tattoo reading Pursuit of happiness running across the outer thigh, with white shorts visible at the left edge.

Pursuit of happiness script on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black script tattoo reads Pursuit of happiness in a flowing cursive hand, running diagonally across the outer thigh. The linework is fine and even, with some variation in weight across the letters and no visible shading. The skin is tanned and the photograph is warm in tone, with white shorts and a grey top at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Thigh Script Quote Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The scrap of paper came in on the tide with a broken lobster creel and a gull's feather stuck to it. Nobody on Skerrow could read the hand at first, for the letters ran into one another like water over stones, and the ink had gone grey at the edges. Mairi Dunn carried it up the brae to her mother, who wore her spectacles on a string and trusted nothing she could not hold in her own palm.

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Her mother read it slowly, moving her lips. Pursuit of happiness. Neither of them knew the phrase. The schoolmaster, who had gone to the city as a young man and come back with a cough and a case of books, said it was from a document about freedom, and that it meant a person was owed the chance to go looking for their own good days. Mairi's mother sniffed at this. Good days were not something you chased like a ewe over the machair. You made them out of what the island gave you, and then you stayed put and kept the peat dry.

But Mairi had seen the ferry leave every Thursday for eleven years, and she had watched the faces at the rail go smaller and smaller until they were only a white thread on the water. That week she copied the words onto the back of her own hand in pen, each loop and tail exactly as it ran on the paper, and she practised them until the ink sank into her skin and would not wash out.

The scrap went above the range, where the steam from the kettle softened the edges of the letters a little more every day. On Thursday Mairi stood at the pier with her case packed and her hand held out, so the gulls and the boatman could see what was written there.