Black brush-script lettering reading in the waves of change we find our direction, framed by an arrow at the top and bottom, shown as a flash design.

Quote lettering with arrows flash design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of handwritten brush-script lettering set across several lines, reading in the waves of change we find our direction. Two arrows, one above and one below the text, frame the lettering. The design uses solid black ink on a white background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Script Quote Arrow Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide tables were still pinned to the back of the door when Ruth came in off the slipway, wet to the elbows and not yet speaking. Her father had painted the arrows on the lifeboat's hull himself the spring before, one pointing out to sea and one pointing home, because he said a crew needed to know which way they were meant to be going. Nobody had ever told her which way that was.

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She sat at the chart table and pulled the letter from inside her oilskin. It was from her brother Tom, written in pencil on the back of a cargo manifest, the words sloping up the page like a man climbing a hill in a hurry. In the waves of change, he had written, and then crossed out the rest of the line so she had to guess at it. Under that he had written direction and underlined it twice. She knew that underline. It meant he had been drinking in Whitby and had meant every word anyway.

Outside, the lamp at the end of the pier came on early, too early for the hour, and she understood that the keeper had been told fog was coming. She opened the paint tin her father kept for the hull lettering, dipped the brush, and wrote her reply across the back of the manifest in plain capitals: COME HOME BY THE EBB. She did not cross anything out.

By dawn the slipway was clear and the boat was gone. The only mark left on the board was Tom's handwriting, copied large above the tide times, pointing her nowhere but out over the water.