Close view of a fine line black script tattoo reading So it goes on the inner forearm, with a pale striped cushion and blue floral print in the background.

Script phrase on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is the phrase So it goes written in a thin, flowing cursive script across the inner forearm. The linework is clean and even, with solid black ink and no shading. The skin tone is warm and the background is soft and out of focus, with a pale cushion and blue patterned fabric.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Phrase Text Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, it spits when the wind comes round the harbour wall. Sit where I can see your face. Now. The Marigold went out of Whitby with eleven men aboard, though it was nine that came home to the quay, and the two that did not were Tom Ashby and his brother Ned, who had argued all the way down the Esk about who should bail. Tom won the argument and drowned for it. So it goes.

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Their mother kept the boat's name painted on the doorpost of her cottage, because she said a name was the last thing a sea couldn't take off you. Every morning she took her knitting to the bench above the slipway and counted the boats coming in over the bar. Nine came back in the first week. Eight in the second. Her neighbour, Mrs Pell, who had lost a husband to the same stretch of water, brought her a pie and told her to stop counting, for counting only made the gulls louder. She did not stop. Nobody ever stopped the counting, not in Whitby.

On the thirteenth morning the Marigold's dinghy came nosing up the estuary with a man in it nobody recognised, thin and sunburnt, wearing Ned's oilskin. He had been picked up off a Norwegian timber ship sixty miles out, and he had kept the coat on because it was the only thing he owned that was dry. He said Ned had gone over the side hauling a net that was too heavy for the three of them, and had gone quick, and had not been afraid.

The mother listened, and then she picked up her knitting, found the dropped stitch, and went on. Her hands were steady. The coat hung on the back of the door for forty years after, and nobody ever again asked her to stop counting. So it goes, my father used to say. Drink your tea, the wind's dropping.