Black ink quote tattoo reading 'The hardest thing in this world is to live in it' in serif lettering, running along a forearm.

Quote tattoo along a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a single line of text tattooed along the inner forearm, reading 'The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.' The letters are a thin, slightly italic serif in black ink, with some variation in weight across the words. The plain pale skin and neutral background keep the focus on the lettering, which runs diagonally across the frame.

Lettering Forearm Quote Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got into the awnings by eight, so the fishmonger's boy was the only one still calling his prices when Tamsin Crewe came down the hill with her husband's coat over her head and a basket with nothing in it. She had not sold anything since the funeral. Nobody said so to her face, but the stallholders moved their boxes to make room when she walked past, and the cheese-woman gave her the bruised pears for nothing.

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On the third Thursday of the wet season an old man called Eli Varro set up under the clock tower with a trestle table and a single tin cup. He sold no goods. He wrote things on slips of paper for a penny, and he would not say what he had written until the buyer had paid and walked off. Tamsin paid him a penny out of spite. He wrote a line in pencil, folded the slip twice, and told her not to read it until she was home with the kettle on.

She read it at the scrubbed table while the kettle hissed. The hardest thing in this world is to live in it, it said, in a thin, leaning hand that looked as if it had been writing the same thing for a long time. She laughed once, badly, and then she could not stop for a while. The rain kept at the window.

In the morning she walked back down to the market with the empty basket, bought one pear, and ate it standing under the clock while the stallholders watched her. For the first time since the funeral, none of them looked away.