Black fine line script reading 'i am because you are' runs along a forearm above a grey knitted sweater.

Script quote along a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm and wrist with a single line of black cursive script reading 'i am because you are'. The lettering uses thin, even linework with a slight slant, running diagonally from the wrist toward the elbow. The background is a soft grey knitted fabric and a dark sleeve, with warm, slightly soft lighting.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Quote Lettering Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are sixteen the spring the telegrams stop coming to Halsey Bridge and start coming to your mother's kitchen instead, and you learn to read the town by who walks up the lane with their cap in their hands. Mr Abernethy, who mends clocks above the dry goods shop, is the only man who doesn't look at the floor when he speaks to you. He keeps a pencil behind each ear and a stub of ink in his waistcoat, and he writes his notes on the backs of calendar pages in a hand that leans like wind off the moor.

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"Read that," he says one Tuesday, sliding a slip across the counter. Four words, looped and slanting: i am because you are. "Where's it from?" you ask. "A man I served with, out of Natal. Their word, not ours. Means nobody is whole on his own." You fold the slip into your apron pocket and carry it all afternoon, the way you'd carry a warm stone from the hearth.

When the Dunmore boy doesn't come up from the pit in October, the town goes quiet in the wrong way, and nobody knows what to do with their hands. You take a pot of tea to Abernethy's shop without anyone asking you to. He is bent over the bench with his magnifier, a pocket watch open on a square of green felt, its small works laid out in rows like teeth. "Still going," he says, not looking up. "Takes two people to wind a spring that size. One to turn, one to hold."

By the following April the church hall lintel needs new lettering, and his fingers are too stiff now for the brush. So you do it yourself, leaning on the ladder with the paint still tacky, each stroke pulling a little to the right the way his did. When you come down, Mrs Dunmore is standing at the gate with her youngest on her hip, and the child points up and says the words aloud, badly, with all the wrong stresses. You don't correct him.