Black script lettering on an arm reading Life is a succession of moments, to live each one is to succeed, set over two lines.

Script quote across the upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Black script lettering on two lines reads Life is a succession of moments, to live each one is to succeed. The looping linework is solid black with no visible shading, and the text runs most of the width of the frame. Warm orange light and a green towel and plastic bottle sit in the background.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pinnock mixed the black on a tin lid balanced across her knees, the wagon's side panel propped against the frost-bitten hay bales of winter quarters. Dunnock's Travelling Circus had one season left in it, Len had said so over the kettle, and he wanted the old red wagon lettered fresh for the last tour so the villages would see something worth paying a shilling for. He had chosen the words himself from a torn page of a library book. Ada had told him they were too long for the panel. He had told her to make them fit.

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So she did. She stretched the capitals tall, let the tail of the y dip under the wheel arch where the mud would only half cover it, and kept the loops of the l's wide enough to breathe. Her hand had lost some of its steadiness since her mother's day, but the strokes still came when she stopped thinking about them. The elephant had gone to a farm in Wales in October. The ringmaster drank from a flask shaped like a horse. The big top leaked over the trapeze rigging, and the rain made a tidy sound on the canvas each night while she worked by a hurricane lamp.

Len came out on the third night with his coat over his nightshirt and read the second line aloud, slowly, as if it were a bill. To live each one is to succeed. He said nobody would buy a ticket to watch a circus fold. Ada kept her brush moving. She said the lettering was the only thing on the lot that would still be standing in spring, and that a sign was meant to outlast the people reading it.

On the last morning she signed the panel in the corner, small, the way her mother had taught her, then left the final stroke of the second line unfinished. The next painter could pick it up and finish it. Len hitched the wagon behind the lorry and the lettering faced the road, wet and black, catching the first light.