Two-panel photo: a black typewriter-style quote reading We're all stories in the end on a forearm, and black concentric circles with a blue watercolour wash on a forearm below.

Quote and concentric circles on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The top panel shows the words "We're all stories in the end." in a black, typewriter-style font across the skin, with fine, even ink and a little blur from the photo. The lower panel shows a row of overlapping black concentric circle motifs with a loose blue watercolour wash behind them, set against a wooden floor. Together the two panels show a text piece and a linework design in different tones of ink.

Lettering Geometric Forearm Quote Text Circle Concentric circle Watercolour Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The telegram came in on the morning tide, soaked at one corner and typed so hard the keys had punched through the paper. Mrs Ashdown read it on the slipway and passed it to me without a word. Four lines from the Dover office about the Marigold, and beneath them, in ink that had bled into the fibres, a sentence nobody in the harbour office had written: We're all stories in the end.

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My father used to draw rings on the back of chandlery bills to explain the harbour to me. A dot for the boat, a circle round it for the wake, another for the swell that outlasted the wake, until the page went black and the dot was lost somewhere at the centre. Every vessel that ever cleared the breakwater, he said, kept spreading past the horizon long after the hull had gone, and the water remembered each one. I thought he was making it up to keep me off the wall.

I rowed out to the mouth of the harbour that afternoon with the telegram folded in my breast pocket and a flat grey pebble in my fist. Where the tide turns, the water lies as smooth as a plate. I dropped the stone and watched the rings go out, one after another, each carrying the last and bending around the pilings. Somewhere beyond the light, I told myself, the Marigold was still making its circles.

I wrote my reply on the back of the telegram in pencil: Still here. Kettle is on. Then I folded it into a little boat, set it on the water, and watched it turn inside the first ring and drift outward into the widening, the way all my father's stories went.