Black script lettering tattoo on the upper arm reading 'our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean'.

Quote about a wave and the ocean on the upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of the quote 'our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean', set in mixed script and hand-lettered capitals of varying sizes. The lines are crisp and even, with solid black strokes and no shading. The text is centred in the frame against plain skin, with a soft, blurred background of shelves or books.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Wave Ocean Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The slate by the potting shed door had outlasted the greenhouse, and by the time I came back to Penhallow that August the chalk on it had mostly gone to ghosts. Grandad Tom copied the lines off a calendar in 1961 and went over them every spring, the way other men rolled up their sleeves before the hay. Our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. He liked the last words best, because from the top field you could see the bay where every wave began.

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The winter gales had taken the lower wall, the one that kept the sea thrift and the rosemary from sliding down onto the shingle. Mrs Jago came up the lane with her rake over one shoulder and looked at the gap for a long time. Leave it, she said. The sea will have it back when it wants it. I told her the sea could wait for its tea like everybody else. She laughed, the way people do when they think you are being stubborn on purpose.

I spent three weekends with Grandad's cold chisel and a bucket of lime, lifting granite that had sat in the same place since before either of us was born. My hands cracked and bled a little, and the seagulls watched me the whole time as though they had money riding on it. By the last Sunday the wall stood level again, and I could see the bay sparkling through the new gap where the old stones had been pulled apart.

That evening I went to the shed and held a wet cloth to the slate. Then I stopped. The rain had softened the chalk into the grain, and the letters were already fading in the way Grandad always said they would. I left them there. Along the foot of the new wall, the thrift had started pushing out pink heads, as if it had only been waiting for someone to ask.