Quote lettering on a forearm
Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
A close photograph of a forearm with the words I'LL BE BETTER THAN I WAS set in black, uppercase block lettering. The text is set on a slight diagonal across the centre of the skin. Dark shaded ink, with a rough, abstract edge, runs along the upper right of the frame, and the background is softly out of focus.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Sit down before you sand that keel, lad, and mind the tar. Forty years ago there was a caulker in this harbour called Eli Marr, who had a tongue like a rasp and hands that never stopped. Every spring he took the same fool's oath at the bottom of a bottle, that the next boat he built would be the finest on the quay. And every spring that boat went out on its first gale and came back with its ribs sprung like a fish's bones.
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One March he stopped swearing the oath and started cutting it. He took a chisel to the lintel of the shed where the Mary Ann sat half-planked, and he gouged out letters a finger deep, block capitals, because he said capitals couldn't lie about how loud they were. I'LL BE BETTER THAN I WAS. He set the line slantwise so it would catch the light off the water, then went at the corner with a rag full of pitch until the wood blackened at the edge like a scorched sail.
Folk laughed at him. The vicar laughed, and so did the lad who sold us bait. But the Mary Ann launched that summer and rode out the autumn storms without a seam weeping, and when Eli died they found the chisel on the sill, worn down to a stub. Nobody ever chose to paint over the words. The sea has been at them forty years now, and you can still read them if you stand where he stood, which is where you're standing now, so mind your feet.
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