Black and white photo of a lettering tattoo reading we're all stories in the end across the back of a neck, with hair falling around it.

Quote tattoo on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of the back of a person's neck, showing a line of text in a serif typeface that reads we're all stories in the end. The lettering is solid black with clean edges and fine serifs, and it runs slightly downward from left to right across the centre of the frame. Hair falls over the upper neck and ears, and the soft grey background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Neck Quote Text Word

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the cabin stove, it spits when the wind comes round off the marsh. No, Tilly, the lock gates don't open for wishes. Listen. Forty years ago there was a bargee called Walter Pike who carried coal up to Oxford on the narrowboat Patience, and he had a habit of writing down everyone he met in a ledger, name and weight and where they were bound.

Keep reading

One November his ledger went over the side in a squall off Culham. He dived for it, the daft bugger, and came up with nothing but a mouthful of river and a page of wet paper with one line left on it, the ink run but readable. Some lad at the last lock had written it down for him, so he swore, before a train took the lad off to London. We're all stories in the end, it said. Walter read it aloud to the lock-keeper's wife, who said it was the sort of thing people carved on headstones when they had no money for a proper epitaph.

He didn't believe it either, not then. But he kept the page dry in a tobacco tin, and the winter the Patience froze in, he took it out every night and told himself a different tale about who he'd been, until the tales began to tell him back. That's the trick of it. You don't write the story. The story writes the teller.

So when the thaw came he put his finger to the ink and went looking for the lad. Found him, too, grown and wrinkled in a bookshop on Broad Street, who laughed and said he'd only copied it off a stranger's neck. Walter asked whose. The lad shrugged. "Does it matter? Somebody's still walking about with it."