Black line tattoo of the words How strange it is to be anything at all inside a looping scroll frame, shown on an arm.

Quote in a swirl frame on an arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black line tattoo of the phrase How strange it is to be anything at all, set in a clean serif lettering and framed by an open, looping scroll border. The words run across the skin at varying angles, following the curve of the arm. The image is a close, slightly soft photograph on a pale background with a fabric sleeve at the bottom edge.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Quote Script Swirl Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herring boats had been out three nights when the net-mender's daughter sat on the slipway with a ball of tarred twine and asked her grandmother what the point of any of it was. The grandmother did not stop knotting. She said the sea did not ask for points, it only asked for hands, and went on with the mesh, a diamond at a time, until the question seemed to belong to somebody else.

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The girl went down to the boats at dawn anyway. Out past the breakwater the fleet lay strung on the swell like beads on a line, and the gulls turned over the water as though someone had shaken them loose. She counted the lamps. Eleven. Then ten, then eleven again when the Mary Ann came round the point with her sail patched grey. Her father stepped onto the quay with a crate of gutted fish on his shoulder and looked at her as if she were the strangest thing the tide had brought in.

"What's wrong with you?" he said. She told him she was trying to work out how a thing could be anything at all, a gull, a lamp, a girl on a slipway. He laughed, and then he didn't, and set the crate down. He told her that on the Hollow Bank, forty years back, a whole crew had been taken and the ship had come home with its nets still wet and nobody on board. Nobody ever found out why. The wind had simply gone on blowing.

She was quiet a long time. Then she carried the twine home and tied the mesh again, one knot, then the next, and when her grandmother asked what she had decided, she said it was strange, and that she would keep doing it anyway.