Close-up of a black lettering tattoo on the inner forearm reading "it's a beautiful day to save lives" in a plain sans-serif font.

Quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a two-line quote tattooed in black, set in a plain sans-serif typeface on the inside of a forearm. The lettering is crisp and solid, with the first line sitting slightly wider than the second, which is centred beneath it. The skin is warm-toned and the background is a dimly lit, out-of-focus shelf with books and objects.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog had sat on Skerry Ness for three days, and Mairi Dunn had stopped counting the foghorn blasts at four hundred. Her father's hands were too stiff for the lamp now, so she climbed the spiral each dusk with the oil can and the tin of matches, talking to the stone the whole way up because nobody else was there to listen.

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On the fourth morning the fog thinned like wet paper, and there was a boat on the rocks below the north side, its mast snapped and a man clinging to the rail. Mairi ran down with a coil of rope over her shoulder. Her father followed at his own pace, shouting that the tide was turning. She did not wait for him. She tied the line round the iron ring by the boathouse, waded into the surf to her waist, and came back with a boy no older than her brother had been, coughing seawater onto the shingle. Then a woman. Then an old man who kept saying the name of his dog.

When the kettle was on and the boy was wrapped in her father's coat, the old man looked at her for a long while. Her father, who had said nothing all morning, finally shrugged at the grey sky pressing down on the water. "Well," he said, "it's a beautiful day to save lives, I suppose." He meant it as a joke against the weather, and it was the only thing he ever said about it.

That spring Mairi painted the words herself on a board above the lighthouse door, in plain black letters, so that anyone rowing in out of the murk would know somebody on the Ness was still counting.