Black and grey lettering tattoo reading MAY THE ODDS BE EVER IN YOUR FAVOR, with a thin arrow running vertically through the words, on the forearm.

Quote lettering with an arrow on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells out the phrase May the odds be ever in your favor in capital letters set in a plain sans-serif typeface, arranged in staggered lines. A slim arrow runs vertically down the centre of the text, with its head at the top and its feathered tail near the bottom. The linework is crisp and even, rendered in black ink with soft grey tones on pale skin against a blurred light background.

Lettering Forearm Text Quote Arrow Lettering Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Abbots Lytten bet on Tom Pellow that Whitsun, not even his mother, so when I chalked his name beside the Swan's barrel at forty to one, the bar roared. I had the book now that my father's hands had gone. He had taught me its first rule: a man who shoots with his jaw clenched will always lose to a man who forgets he is being watched.

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Tom's rival was Harry Caddick, the miller's son, whose arrows flew as though they had been paid for in advance. On the morning of the match a wind came hard off the water and set every flag along the butts snapping. Tom stood on the mark with a shaft he had fletched himself from a goose feather, slightly crooked at the nock. When the marshal asked if he was ready, Tom said, "May the odds be ever in your favour," and then nobody laughed, because it sounded less like a joke than a prayer.

Harry shot first and split the gold. Tom never looked at the target. He watched the red ribbon on the far post, counted three breaths, and let go on the fourth. The arrow climbed into the grey and seemed to hang there, then dropped clean into the gold beside Harry's, close enough that the marshal had to measure it with a knotted cord.

I shortened Tom to evens before the scores were read. I still have the ledger. Beside his name, in my father's careful hand, is one word I never understood until that afternoon: lucky. I crossed it out and wrote skill underneath, and I have never been certain I was right.