Black serif lettering reading 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past' across a forearm, with a beach and sea behind.

Quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black serif quotation tattooed on the inner arm, set in several lines that step down diagonally across the skin. The lettering is crisp, solid black ink with no shading, and the skin tone is warm and slightly pink. Out of focus behind the arm are the sea, a few bathers and sand, which place the tattoo outdoors in daylight.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every evening at the turn of the tide, Agnes Corrie rowed out from Skerrow Head with the lamp her husband had left on the thwart the morning the Brightwater went down. She rowed hard, the oars biting, and every evening the current took the boat back and set it grating on the same shingle where she had started, the lamp still unlit.

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Her neighbours told her to stop. The minister said the sea kept what it was given and she should let it be. Old Tam at the chandlery said a body could row all its life and never get past the bar, because the water ran the wrong way for anyone who wanted to go back. Agnes said nothing to any of them. She only pulled harder.

On the forty-first night the wind dropped and the water lay flat as slate. Agnes looked over her shoulder and saw the harbour as it had been: the jetty without its broken rail, the boats with their names still bright, a young man in a blue jersey waving his cap at a girl on the wall. She understood then that the current was not against her at all. It was carrying her backwards, gently, the way you carry a child asleep.

She let the oars trail. When the boat drifted in, the lamp was lit, and the shingle was dry.