Black ink tattoo of the words how strange it is to be anything at all, set within swirling scrollwork on the upper arm.

Quote lettering in scrollwork on an arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads how strange it is to be anything at all, with the words set in a clean sans-serif typeface and arranged in curved lines. Thin black outlines form large scrolls and flourishes that frame the text on the skin. The image is entirely black ink on pale skin, with a soft, shallow focus and a fabric sleeve at the bottom edge.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Lettering Scrollwork Swirl Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last bill the Marrowby Travelling Circus ever ran was painted by a sign-writer named Idris Calloway, who was sent for from the far side of the valley because nobody left in the county could make a curl hold its shape in wet paint. He sat on an upturned crate behind the big top with a sable brush and a pot of lamp black, while the ringmaster, a thin man with a cough, stood over him and asked for words that would bring the people through the gate one more time.

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Idris wanted nothing grand. He set the sentence in a plain letter, the sort that could be read from the road at a trot, and then he wound scrolls around it the way the old rope-walkers wound their wire. The ringmaster said nobody would pay to read a banner. Idris said they would pay to stop and wonder at it. So each evening for a week the villagers came in grumbling about the price and went out again slowly, looking back at the canvas as if it had something to say about their own feet.

On the last night the lady on the trapeze climbed to her perch and found she could not stop looking down at the words painted on the flap. The ringmaster read them aloud to the empty stands, and the old dog under the wagon thumped its tail, and nobody could say afterwards whether the sentence had made the night better or worse.

Idris took the banner down at dawn, rolled it tight around a broom handle, and gave it to Nell, the youngest of the Marrowby girls, who carried it up the lane on her shoulder like a flag. Forty years later it was still hanging in her kitchen, the curls faded to grey, and she would tell visitors that a painter had once made the whole circus say something true about itself.