Black lettering tattoo of a quote about courage on the outer thigh, framed by ornate scrolls and set in a mix of bold and italic serif type.

Quote tattoo with scrollwork on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo on the outer thigh reads "It takes courage to grow up and become who you truly are," attributed to e.e. cummings. Two ornamental scroll flourishes frame the text at the top and bottom, and the type mixes bold capitals with smaller italic lines. The ink is solid black with clean edges, and the photograph is shot straight on against a white and cream polka dot bedspread.

Lettering Thigh Quote Lettering Scrollwork Flourish Text Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the hard January the frost came down so thick that the ewes stood in the lane and would not move, and Hal Corrigan's youngest, Nell, went out before light with a hurdle on her back and a lantern with a cracked glass. Her father had said that a girl who would one day take the farm did not need a name of her own yet. She said nothing back. She only got up earlier.

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At the bottom of the lower field stood the old gatepost, and on it someone years back had nailed a board with words burned into the wood: a line about courage, and below it the name of a man from over the sea who had never set foot on Corrigan land. Nell could not read well, so her mother had read it to her every Sunday until she could say it by heart. It takes courage to grow up and become who you truly are. She had always thought it was a thing grown folk said to children. Standing in the snow with three ewes calling behind her, she began to think it might be a dare.

She found the lamb in the ditch under the hedge, its mother stiff beside it. She wrapped it inside her coat and walked back the long way, past the board, past the house where her father's voice was already shouting for her. In the yard she set the lamb down by the range and told him plainly that she would keep the flock on the high pasture from now on, and he could give her the lease or give it to Dunstan's boy. He looked at her a long while.

He did not answer that morning. In March he signed the paper over, and the board came down the next winter when the post rotted through. Nell took it into the cart shed and hung it where she could see the burned letters every time she reached for the shears. The lamb grew into a ewe with a lamb of her own, and in the lane each February the two of them stood stubborn in the frost until someone came out with a lantern to fetch them.