Black fine line lettering reading this too shall pass with a small arrow beneath it, tattooed on the neck behind the ear.

Quote and arrow behind the ear

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words this too shall pass in lowercase lettering, with a small arrow pointing right beneath the final word. The lines are thin and even, in a single dark ink with no shading, and the text runs horizontally across the skin. The photograph is taken close up from behind, with the ear and hair framing the right side of the composition.

Lettering Fine line Neck Quote Text Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign above the pumps at Coyote Wells had faded to the colour of old bone, but Mabel Stroud touched up the letters every spring with a tin of white enamel. THIS TOO SHALL PASS, it read, with a black arrow beneath pointing east, out past the diner and the dry lake towards nothing in particular. Her husband painted it the summer the bridge washed out and the trucks stopped coming. He used to say the arrow was the only honest part, because a road always goes somewhere and nobody can argue with a road.

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I came off the old highway at dusk with a bent axle and a dead phone, looking for a tow and something cold to drink. Mabel sold me an orange soda from a cooler that hummed like it held a grudge, and told me the recovery man was out at the Hadley place and would come when the moon cleared the ridge. We sat on the step while dust settled in the gutters and a ballgame from Nevada crackled in and out of the radio on the sill.

Around nine a boy rode in on a bicycle with a flat front tyre and asked if she had any patches. She didn't, so she sent him round to the shed anyway, and he came back grinning with a rusted tin of glue older than he was. While he worked the wheel, Mabel said she had been wrong about the arrow for years. 'Dan meant it for the people leaving,' she said, 'but I think now about the ones who come in tired and filthy, looking for a place to stop.'

The tow truck's headlights swung across the sign a little before midnight, and the arrow lit up white under the paint. It pointed at the dark road I had come in on, and at the boy pumping air into his tyre, and at the long stretch of tarmac ahead of all of us that nobody had yet decided to take.