Black serif lettering on a forearm reads 'On a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam', lit by a bright patch of light against a dark background.

Quote reading 'On a mote of dust' on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a line of black text tattooed on the inner forearm, set in two lines in a plain serif typeface. The lettering uses solid black ink with clean, even edges and sits across a patch of strong sunlight that falls on the skin. The dark background fills the rest of the frame and draws attention to the text.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cat. No, not that one, the one with the bad ear. Right. You'll have heard about the lamp-room above Morrow Street, where the bulbs got changed every Tuesday by a man called Elias Penrose who never once looked up. That was the trouble with him. He looked at his hands, at the wire, at the glass, and never at the light coming down through the skylight at four in the afternoon.

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One November the skylight cracked, and a sunbeam pushed through the grime and lay across his bench like a plank of gold. Elias stopped. There was dust in it, turning slow, a thousand small worlds doing their sums. He watched one mote, a grey speck no bigger than a full stop, drift from the top of the beam to the bottom and back up again, and he swore on his mother's teapot that it was going somewhere important.

He spent three weeks following that speck with a magnifier and a stub of pencil. He wrote down every turn it made in a ledger, the date beside each one. He never caught it. On the last afternoon the sun slid off the bench, and the mote went down into the dark with all its brothers, and Elias sat with the lamp unlit and laughed until the people on Morrow Street came out to see what was wrong.

They found him still at the bench, the ledger open, the window gone grey, and a long page of tiny careful numbers that nobody in the town has ever been able to add up.