Black lettering reading EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT, framed by green leaf sprigs on each side, shown on skin.

Quote lettering with leaf sprigs

Lettering · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is a three-line block of lettering that reads EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT, with the word BEAUTIFUL set larger than the lines above and below. The letters are filled in solid black with clean, even edges, and a sprig of green leaves with small dark stems curls around each end of the text. The design is centred in the frame and shown against plain, lightly textured skin.

Lettering Botanical Quote Text Leaves Foliage Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road over the moor closed on the Tuesday, and by Thursday the only traffic at the Coldharbour was the snowplough's orange light sliding past the window every few hours. I had three rooms let, a fire that needed feeding every forty minutes, and a sign-writer called Marjorie Pell asleep in the room over the bar, because she had come to repaint the board and the board was now under two feet of drift.

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She came down on the Friday with paint on her cuffs and asked what I wanted it to say. I said the old board was fine, only the paint had blistered. She shook her head and said there was pencil on the back of it, rubbed nearly to nothing, and she had copied it before the scraper took the rest. It read EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT. I told her that wasn't a line Dennis would ever have written. He wrote about the beer being warm and the cellar smelling of mice.

She laughed and said that was how she knew it was his. She painted it in capitals, the middle word taller than the rest because, she said, that was where the weight sat. Round each end she put a sprig of leaves, dark stems and green leaves like the hawthorn that grew by our gate, the sort of thing nobody had ever bothered to paint on a pub sign in this valley.

When the plough finally cleared the lane on Sunday, she hung it on the bracket above the door, climbed down, and wiped her brushes on a rag. I read it from the step with the snow up to my shins. Dennis would have hated it. I stood there a long time anyway, not thinking about anything hurting, only about the cold working its way through my boots.