Black lettering reading To die will be an awfully big adventure above an outlined star tattoo on a forearm.

Quote and star on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a block-capital quote in a black serif typeface, set across three lines and reading To die will be an awfully big adventure. Below the text sits a simple outlined eight-pointed star with thin, sharp points and an unshaded centre. The ink is solid black on pale skin, shot straight on against a plain light background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been coming sideways since noon, and by the time I reached the Scar Gate the lantern was the only thing I could still see clearly. Behind me, Mr Hallam had stopped twice to tell me he was perfectly well. The third time he stopped, he sat down on a boulder and did not get up, and I had to kneel in the drift and shake his shoulder until he looked at me.

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He had paid for a guide and then refused one, which is how most of my trade ends up on the rocks. His coat was a city coat and his boots had never been greased. He held a page torn from a book, soft at the folds, and when I asked what it was he said it was the only thing his sister had given him that he hadn't broken. Then, through chattering teeth, he read it aloud: to die will be an awfully big adventure. I told him that sounded like something a man says before he has tried walking uphill in a blizzard.

He laughed, which was the wrong thing to do, and then he cried, which was better. I got him up. We went on past the old cairn with the star cut into its face, eight points worn smooth by a century of gloves. My father taught me that the star marks the true line over the pass: keep the long point at your back and you stay off the scree. So I followed it and talked the whole way, about bread and goats and my brother's terrible singing, until the hut shutter showed a thin crack of yellow light.

Mr Hallam is back in the city now. He sends a card each Christmas with a picture of a street lamp. Every winter I still walk the pass with a lantern, and I still check the cairn first.