Black lettering tattoo reading 'we're all stories in the end, just make it a good one' with a dotted line and bow tie motif, placed across the upper back.

Quote with bow tie across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two lines of typewriter-style text, 'we're all stories in the end. just make it a good one.', with a dotted line running beneath and a small bow tie at its centre. The lettering and rule are rendered in solid black ink with clean, even edges and no shading. The text fills the frame diagonally across smooth skin, with a dark fabric strap visible at the left edge.

Lettering Back Text Quote Bow tie Dotted line Typewriter font

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 Ledger Room at the back of Fenwick's Printers smelled of ink and wet paper, and by eleven at night Maud Pell was the only one left to fight the Linotype. Gerald had gone home to his wife with the bowling trophies. The evening edition was already half set, and the front page still wanted a headline, so she sat down at the old Remington in the corner, the one with the sticking e, and typed out the line she had been carrying around since her mother's funeral in March.

Keep reading

It was a silly sentence, the sort her mother used to say over burnt toast and cold tea. We're all stories in the end. Maud had laughed at it for thirty years and never once believed it, not even the morning she found the photograph of her father hidden inside a hymnal. She typed it twice, once in capitals and once without, then tore the sheet free and held it to the lamp. The letters were crooked, the e had dropped below the line like a wink, and somehow that made it sound more like her mother.

She pinned the strip above the proofing bench and went back to the bow tie she had been drawing in the margin of the obituary column, the one her mother always wore on Sundays. Then she found the dotted rule she used to separate the letters page and tapped it under the words, a little dash, a little dot, until the whole thing looked finished.

In the morning Gerald found it pinned up and asked who had written it. Maud told him the truth: her mother had, on the back of a seed packet, and it had only been waiting for someone to set it in type. He read it twice, nodded, and said it was a good one to end on. She didn't correct him. She went to start the presses.