Black script quote reading 'To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong' over rainbow watercolour splashes on a forearm.

Quote lettering with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo reads 'To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong' in black script, set in a staggered layout across the forearm. Behind the lettering are soft watercolour-style splashes in red, orange, yellow, green and purple that blend into the skin. The photograph has a plain white background, with a hand visible at the top right.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cat. You want the story of Mabel Foy and the wall at Haddon Mill, or you want to sit there picking at your boots? Mabel painted signs for the bakers, the chandlers and the undertaker, and she was good at it, so good that her father would not let her touch anything that mattered. Every morning she lettered the same black words on the same white boards, and every morning she looked out of the back window at the river going copper and plum in the evening light and felt her hands go stiff.

Keep reading

One Tuesday the bakery oven cracked and the loaves came out grey as slate. The baker's wife came shouting down the lane, and Mabel, who had been told all her life that a sign that is wrong gets read wrong, took the bucket of her father's leftover pigments out to the back wall and flung it. She did not stop to think. Red ran into orange, green crept into the yellow, and a purple streak hung off the bricks like a drip from a tap that had been left on too long. Her father came out with his mouth already open to shout.

He shut it again. The baker's wife stood in the lane with her hands on her hips, and then she laughed, and then the whole street was looking at the wall. Mabel fetched her brush and wrote underneath, in the thin, fast script she used for funeral notices, the words she had copied from a battered book of letters: To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong. The street read it aloud, one person after another, until it sounded like a hymn.

The wall came down when they built the new road. But the baker's grandson kept the board she lettered for the shop window, and he says that every morning, before he lifts the shutters, he reads it, then looks out at the river and gets one small thing wrong on purpose, so the day can begin properly. Now, who wants the next one? Not you, Tom, you're too busy with your boots.

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