Small black serif lettering reading No matter who you are, always be the good one, with a small red heart below it, on a forearm.

Quote and red heart on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with a sleeve rolled up, showing two lines of black serif lettering that read No matter who you are, always be the good one. A small outlined red heart sits beneath the text. The background is a plain grey top and an indoor setting, with the lettering centred on the forearm.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Quote Lettering Heart Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hollin Ford had nine cottages, a chapel with a leaking roof, and one ferry, and the ferryman, Abel Starling, kept a saying on the wall of his hut in carpenter's pencil. Visitors took it for a joke. The villagers took it for a reproach. It read, plainly, No matter who you are, always be the good one, and Abel repainted the letters every spring when the damp got into them.

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The winter the river rose over the willow roots, a stranger came down the towpath with a wet dog and a leather satchel and asked to be carried across. He was a man from the county with a tight collar and a notice folded inside his coat. Abel took his penny and rowed. Halfway over, the stranger asked what the writing on the wall was for, and Abel said it was for anyone who had already decided who deserved kindness and who did not, since those were the people who needed reminding most.

On the far bank, Eli Dunne was waiting with his cap pulled low. Eli was nineteen and had taken the poor box money from St Michael's three weeks before, and the county man had come to take him to the assizes. Abel had seen the boy's hands shaking on the oars the week before and had said nothing to anyone. When the stranger stepped onto the mud and asked whether he had seen the boy, Abel said he had ferried twenty people that week and would not know one from another. The county man grunted, climbed the bank, and set off towards the bridge road with his dog.

That evening Abel took a red chalk from his pocket and drew a small heart beneath the words, the way his mother had marked the flour tins. It did not mend anything. It only meant he had chosen, and he wanted to see it every morning.