Black Lettering-style script tattoo reading "Only after disaster can we be resurrected" on the upper arm of a man with his arm raised behind his head.

Quote tattoo on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A man with his arm raised behind his head shows a black script tattoo on the inner upper arm, running diagonally in two lines of text. The lettering is fine and set in a classic serif-style hand with uneven baseline, reading "Only after disaster can we be resurrected". The ink is solid black with no colour, and the photograph is taken indoors against a plain pale wall with a black wristband visible.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Word Script

Find an artist for this

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

The Sorrel had been under four feet of brown water for nine days when my father finally stopped pretending the cabin was dry. We tied up at Hartwell lock with the bilge pump chattering like a gull and the cabin smelling of wet rope and paraffin. Nobody on the towpath would look at us. They had their own sandbags to count.

Keep reading

Ada Pryce, who kept the lock cottage, brought us a kettle and a tin of shortbread gone soft at the edges. She had a ledger where she wrote down every boat that had gone under the weir since 1947, and she turned it round on the table so I could read the page for the Mary Ellen. Her name was still painted on the stern in the photograph, cream on green, and the caption said she had been taken apart for scrap the following spring. Ada tapped the page with one finger. Under it she had written, in pencil, the words the river would not let anyone forget: only after disaster can we be resurrected.

My father spent the next week scraping the Sorrel's name off her bow and painting it again, letter by letter, in the cold. I asked him why he bothered when the water had taken the engine, the stove and most of the coal. He said paint was the cheapest thing we had left to lose, and that a boat without a name was only a hull.

On the morning the water dropped below the lock beam, the first working barge came through the gates with its diesel coughing blue. Ada raised her mug to it from the bank. The Sorrel followed low in the water, her new lettering wet and bright, and behind us the weir kept roaring as if it had not finished counting.