Fine line black script reading joie de vivre with a trailing line and full stop on the inner forearm of a person in a grey knit jumper.

Script phrase "joie de vivre" on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a thin black script phrase, joie de vivre, with a long underline flourish and a full stop at the end, sitting along the inner forearm near the wrist. The linework is delicate and even, with solid black ink and no shading. The image is in soft natural light, with a grey knit sweater covering the upper arm and the hand resting in the foreground, and the phrase is the clear focal point.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Phrase Handwriting Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit, sit, the queue will keep. You did not come to this hut for stamps, you came for the pen, and the pen is older than the frontier wire. My mother's cousin Odile kept this post for thirty winters, and she told it the way I am telling it to you, with her hand flat on the counter so the customs men would know she was not afraid of them.

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It was the autumn the snow came early over the Col des Vents Gris. A schoolmistress called Marguerite came up the track with a satchel of letters for a husband who had gone over the mountain to work the quarries and had not written in a year. Émile, the young guard, turned out her satchel, unfolded every letter, and asked what business a schoolmistress had with so much paper. She said the business was love. He laughed, and gave her back her pen only after she had signed the slip.

The slip was the only paper left to her. She wrote her sister's name, then the words joie de vivre, because that was what her sister had always said she lacked. Her pen skipped in the cold and dragged a long tail beneath them like a rope pulling a boat. She would not waste a second sheet. She pressed a full stop at the end so the thing could not run on into fear, and pushed the slip across the counter.

Émile pinned it above the stove, and it stayed there thirty winters, long after the quarries closed and Marguerite's husband came home thinner and kinder. Whenever a traveller hands me papers I look for the stop at the end of the line, because a sentence that ends cleanly is a sentence somebody chose to finish. Now give me your papers, and mind the step.