Script lettering reading Never don't give up

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of black script lettering reading "Never don't give up" across the inner upper arm. The letters are smooth, solid black with a slight tapering in the strokes, and the skin around them looks lightly flushed. The text runs horizontally across the centre of the frame against a plain, softly blurred background.

Lettering Upper arm Script Text Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada, The lock at Hythe has been stuck since Tuesday, so we are tied up below the mill with the cabin smelling of wet coats and Dad's pipe. He has sat on the gunwale for three days telling the ducks the river has finally won. I have been reading the chalkboard in the lock-keeper's hut instead, because there is nothing else to read out here.

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Someone has written across the top of it in capitals gone soft with damp: NEVER DON'T GIVE UP. You will say I am making it up, so I copied it out for you on the back of the toll receipt. Mr Pryce, who has kept that lock since before the war, says his mother wrote it when his father went off to the coal boats and never came back up the cut. He says the double negative was her doing, that one never was not nearly enough and she wanted two to hold the thing down.

I laughed at him, Ada, and then I stopped laughing, because on Wednesday he hauled the top gate open himself with a pole and a length of rope while the water came over his boots. Dad got up off the gunwale to help. The two of them pulled until the gate groaned and gave, and Dad came back to the boat grinning like a boy with a catapult.

The board still says what it says. The rain has washed half the chalk off the hinge side, but NEVER and UP are sharp enough to read from the towpath, and I think she was right about the grammar. Come up at the weekend. Bring your gloves, and do not let Dad tell you the river is dead.

Love, Bea