Black lettering tattoo on the inner forearm reading "What don't kill you'll make you more strong", with a geometric four-pointed star at the wrist.

Quote and star on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black script quote runs across the forearm, reading "What don't kill you'll make you more strong", with the words set in a flowing blackletter-style hand. A sharp, angular four-pointed star sits at the wrist end of the line, drawn in solid black with a small inner detail. The ink is black only, shown against pale skin with the arm photographed on a light surface.

Lettering Geometric Forearm Quote Script Star Text

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the stove won't feed itself. No, Tommy, I'm not telling the one about the pony. This is about Ada Sloan's husband, who went down Scarrow the winter the roof came in, and came back up with a hand that wouldn't close and a mouth that wouldn't stop. He had the words put on his arm before he ever went under, and he'd say them to anyone at the lamp room: what don't kill you. Half the village reckoned the gas had addled him. The other half reckoned he'd copied it off a tin of tea.

Keep reading

Ada didn't reckon either. She watched him sit at the kitchen table for three months with his bad hand flat on the oilcloth, trying to lift his cup with it, and every morning he tried again. The day the fingers finally took the handle, he didn't drink. He just looked at her and laughed till he coughed, and she said, what's so funny, and he said, the thing I was trying to tell you was never about the roof.

That's the bit I want you to keep. The mark on his wrist was the pattern of the old pit-head lamp, the star they'd cut into the brass so the overman could read the flame through the gauze. It looked like nothing to me but a bit of sharp tin. He said a star is only sharp because every point has been pulled in from the middle, and you don't get to be a star any other way.

He went back down in spring. Ada walked him to the cage, and she never told a soul what she said to him at the bottom of it, which is why I'm telling you now, and why you'll keep it out of the Crown on a Friday.