Black serif lettering tattooed on the inner forearm reads: We define ourselves by the best that is in us, not the worst that has been done to us.

Quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a block of black serif text set in five centred lines across the inner forearm, reading 'We define ourselves by the best that is in us, not the worst that has been done to us.' The letters are crisp, with even, solid black ink and no shading or colour. The photograph is taken close up and straight on, with the text filling the centre of the frame against a dark sleeve and a pale background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Pell had cooked for the herring drifter Kittiwake for thirty-one seasons, and in all that time she never wrote a man's name on the slate above the range. The skipper's son asked her why, the autumn he came aboard with a split lip and a temper to match. She told him the slate was for counting salt and biscuit, not for keeping score of what people had done to you, because the sea would keep that score without any help from her.

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The boy Dougal came in February, sent up from Peterhead with a tin trunk and a cough that rattled. Garrity, the mate, took a belt to him before the nets were shot, for a coil of rope left out in the rain. After that Dougal ate at the rail and slept with his boots on. Agnes set a warm bannock on the bench beside him each night and said nothing about it, because she had learned that a kindness given quietly was the only sort that did not get kicked over.

On the last night of the season, with the boat rolling into Fraserburgh harbour and the lamps swinging, Dougal asked her how a person could tell what he was made of when everyone kept telling him something else. Agnes took the chalk from its nail, wiped the slate clean with her sleeve, and wrote in her square hand what her mother used to say over a bad bargain: we define ourselves by the best that is in us, and not by the worst that has been done to us.

Dougal read it twice with his lips moving. In the morning Garrity came down for his tea, saw the slate, and stood a long while in the doorway. He sat down without being asked and said the boy could have the bunk by the stove. Dougal picked up the chalk, and beneath the old woman's words, in letters that wobbled but held, he wrote his own name.