Close photo of a black serif lettering tattoo on the inner wrist reading 'It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.'

Quote tattoo on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of three lines of serif lettering tattooed across the inside of a wrist, reading 'It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.' The letterforms are crisp and evenly weighted, with the ink appearing dark brown-black. The text is centred on the wrist against a plain, pale skin background with a dark surface and a few small yellow objects at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Lettering Dream

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Aske kept the post office counter at the bottom of Harrow Lane, and she had a rule about envelopes that came through with the wrong postcode. You did not open them. You wrote the sender a card to say they had gone astray, then slid the envelope into the drawer under the scales. Tomas, nineteen and up from the coast to learn the trade, thought the drawer was full of trouble until he counted the contents one wet Thursday and found forty-one letters, every one addressed to the cottage at the forest edge that had burned in the winter of the great frost.

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He asked her about it over the tea urn. She did not look up from the stamp ledger. "People write to the dead when they can't sleep," she said. "The dead don't answer. The writing does the work regardless."

He thought about that all afternoon, sorting parcels for the mill. Beyond the last bend the birches went pale and tight, and the village children dared each other to touch the first trunk. That night he sat at his lodging with a sheet of his own paper, meaning to write to his mother, and instead wrote a line he had heard a schoolmaster say years ago and never forgotten: it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live. He read it back. It looked like something lettered on a board above a public house, so he crossed it out, then wrote it again underneath, smaller.

In the morning he walked the forest path with the letter in his coat. The cottage was only a chimney and a square of nettles now. He knelt, pushed the envelope through the gap where the back door had been, and felt it drop onto the cold hearthstone. It had no stamp and no return address. Behind him the birches stood very still in the daylight, and for the first time since he had come to Harrow Lane he did not look back at them.