Black script lettering reading 'To live is just to fall asleep, to die is to awaken' across the upper chest, in a lettering style.

Script quote across upper chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of two lines of black cursive script tattooed across the upper chest, reading 'To live is just to fall asleep, to die is to awaken.' The letters have smooth, even linework with some variation in weight, and the ink is solid black with no shading or colour. The text is centred in the frame against soft, lightly lit skin, with a pink fabric edge in the lower left corner.

Lettering Chest Quote Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been writing other people's words since the market in Digbeth moved under canvas for the winter, and the rain has never once stopped you. Ruth at the next pitch sells secondhand hymn books and says you have the only dry hands in the place, which is a lie, because your fingers are damp from the jar of water you keep for brushes. Today a man stops at your trestle with a folded umbrella and asks whether you can write a line on the back of a photograph for his mother's funeral sheet.

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He does not know what he wants. He keeps saying something ordinary, then something she would have liked. You ask what she liked. He says she slept in the afternoons in the armchair by the window with the radio murmuring, and that she used to say to live is just to fall asleep, so she was only practising for the big one. You write nothing for a while. The rain drums on the tarp, and the gutter above you sags into a long silver rope that shivers whenever a lorry passes.

You settle on her words exactly as he gave them to you, and you write them in your slowest cursive with a fine nib, the loops leaning into one another like people sharing an umbrella. When you finish, you turn the card round so he can read it. He reads it twice, then folds it into his coat without a word and pays you in coins still warm from his pocket.

Walking home past the shuttered fishmongers, you realise the lettering will outlast the card. Somewhere a stranger will read it on a wall or a wrist and decide it means something new. That, you think, is the trade: you hand the line over, and it keeps working for someone else long after the rain has washed the market away.