Black and grey fine line script tattoo reading Life is only precious because it ends, running along the collarbone and shoulder.

Quote script along the collarbone

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a person's upper chest and shoulder, with a thin chain necklace. The tattoo is a cursive script quote, Life is only precious because it ends, running diagonally from the collarbone towards the shoulder. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the soft black and white photograph gives the lettering strong contrast against the skin.

Fine line Lettering Shoulder Script Quote Text Collarbone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Mary Ellen had waited at Kintbury for three weeks for her name to go back on, and Tom Rudd was not a man who hurried a signwriter's brush. He mixed his gold size in a jam jar on the roof, squinting at the towpath as if the words might walk up it on their own. The commission had come by letter, not telephone: a woman in a grey coat had left it at the yard, asking for a line along the cabin side. It was not her husband's name. It was only the words Life is only precious because it ends, written slantwise in a hand like running water.

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Tom didn't like slanted lettering. Boats were level things, he said, and the eye wants a horizon. But the woman had paid in full and sat on the bench by the lock while he chalked the layout onto the grey paint. She watched the first capital go down, the swash of the L curling over the rivet line, and said nothing until he had finished the word is. Then she asked whether it would wash off in rain. Tom told her paint lasted if it was looked after. She said that was the trouble with most things.

When he finished the last s, the sun had slipped behind the poplars and the lock was filling with a low grumble. She stepped aboard without a word, laid her palm flat against the wet cabin, and stood there while the letters dried. Tom packed his brushes and left her to it. Behind him the gates swung open and the Mary Ellen lifted on the water, the new gold catching the last of the light.

The rain came in the second week of April, a hard grey week, and when Tom walked the towpath again the first word had bled at its edges like a letter left out in weather. He stood on the bank with his jar of size and looked for the woman in the grey coat. The bench by the lock was empty. Someone had left a small glass bottle of gold paint on the handrail, its cap twisted tight, with a note folded beneath it that said only: for when it fades. He turned the bottle over in his palm and found it was already warm from the sun.