Black serif lettering tattoo on an upper arm reading we all have scars and we all have stories, in a lettering style.

Quote tattoo reading we all have scars

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of black serif text read "we all have scars." and "we all have stories." across the skin of an arm. The lettering is solid black with crisp edges and no shading or colour. The arm fills the right side of the frame, with a dark sleeve at the top and a blurred blue and white patterned fabric and pale background behind it.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Text Scar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Aldric had mended the same psalter three times before the abbot finally asked him to stop. The vellum had split along the spine where a damp winter had crept into the chest, and each time he sewed the gathering back, the thread pulled the old tear wider. He sat with the book open on his knees in the cold scriptorium, a candle guttering beside the paste pot, and considered the crack the way a surgeon considers a wound he cannot close.

Keep reading

Young Wulfric, who had come up from the fens in the autumn, watched him from the next bench. 'Why keep at it, Brother? The words are all there. You can read them through the break.'

Aldric ran a thumb along the seam. The edge was soft and yellowed, feathered with the marks of a hundred earlier repairs, some by hands long dead. 'A book with no scars is only a book nobody has read,' he said. 'Every patch in here is somebody's answer to a bad year. Look at this one.' He turned to a leaf where a brown stain had been lifted and a fresh square of skin laid over it, the new ink hardly darker than the old. 'That was a fire. And that was a flood. Whoever mended it kept the marks on purpose.'

Wulfric frowned at the pages. 'So the mess is the history.'

'The mess is the story,' Aldric said, and reached for the awl. He stitched the gathering with slow, exact pulls, leaving the old tear visible beneath the new thread, and when he was done he closed the psalter and set it on the shelf between the others, its spine no longer hiding what had happened to it.