Quote tattoo across upper back
Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo
A black and white photograph of a person's upper back, with hair tied up at the top of the frame and the face not shown. The tattoo is a line of serif lettering reading I am the architect of my own Destruction, with a thin decorative flourish underneath. The ink is solid black with soft grey tones in the skin, and the text is centred in the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Mr Aldous Pim had cut letters into Portland stone for thirty-one years and never once spelled a word wrong, so when the widow Hartigan brought him a scrap of paper with a sentence on it, he read it twice and asked her to say it aloud. "I am the architect of my own destruction," she said, and then, with the air of a woman correcting a grocer, "with a capital D, if you please. My husband always capitalised the things that frightened him."
Keep reading
Pim thought it an odd thing to put on a monument, yet the money was good and the stone was already on the cart. He chose a face called Caslon Old Style, cut the serifs deep enough to hold lamp-black through the rain, and set the line across the top of a plain grey slab in Harrogate churchyard. The flourish beneath he drew himself, a thin curl like a fern uncoiling, because the widow wanted something that looked as if it had been signed.
Years later a boy from the village came to his workshop with a penknife and a question about why the D was bigger than the rest. Pim told him the truth, which was that he had asked the same thing and been given no answer. He had only learned that a man can put his own name to a sentence without knowing whether it is a warning or a boast, and that stone keeps both equally well.
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