Black linework flash design of a robot head inside circular blackletter-style lettering reading YOU ARE WHO YOU CHOOSE TO BE, drawn on cream paper.

Robot head with circular quote lettering design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a robot head with a tall crest, round eyes and a flat panelled jaw, set at the centre of a circle. The words YOU ARE WHO YOU CHOOSE TO BE curve around the top and bottom of the circle in decorative lettering. The design is drawn in black ink on cream paper with no shading or colour, and a black pen lies across the lower part of the frame.

Traditional Lettering Robot Lettering Quote Circle Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Settle down, the lot of you, and give Old Ada her chair, because I'm not telling this one standing. Everyone in Gullhaven says the iron man came in on the spring tide the year the herring failed, and that's true as far as it goes. What they don't say is that he came up the slipway on his knees, dragging one foot like a dinghy with a cracked keel, and the first thing he asked was what day it was.

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Nobody answered him. The gulls never do. He went to Pell's chandlery and asked the same, and Pell, counting bolts, said, 'You're blocking the cart road, and that's all the day you need.' The iron man considered this very seriously. Then he asked where he was meant to go, and nobody had ever put that question to him before, so nobody had an answer.

Nell Harrow, the harbourmaster's girl, was the only one who sat down beside him. She had a tin of ship's biscuits and a head full of questions. She handed him one, and he turned it over in his great fingers for a long while. 'I think I am meant to be something,' he said. 'Then be it,' said Nell, which is a daft thing for a child to say, and he took it to heart.

The winter gale took the sea wall in the night, and he was out on the rocks with a rope in his teeth before the bell rang. He hauled four men off the Marigold and never once asked whose boat it was. When they asked him after why he'd done it, he tapped the bent crest on his head and said, 'I chose to.' Nobody could argue with a giant.

Nell's chalk words are long gone from the breakwater, the sea having had its say. But on a clear morning, if you squint, you can still see them curving round the wall like the rim of a tin lid. Go on, off with you. The tide won't wait for old women.