Black script lettering reading Never run faster than your guardian angel can fly, tattooed in a long line across a bare back.

Script quote along the back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a bare back with a single line of black cursive script tattooed diagonally across it, reading "Never run faster than your guardian angel can fly". The lettering has fine, even strokes with thicker joins, and the ink sits crisply against warm, sun-tanned skin. The background is softly out of focus, showing grass and people, and the frame is cropped tightly around the tattoo.

Lettering Back Quote Script Lettering Angel Flying

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lad from the bakery had been sprinting for the 6.10 to Colchester every morning for a month, and every morning the guard shut the doors a second before he reached them. On Thursday, with flour still on his sleeves and his breath gone, I gave him the saying my father gave me when I was twelve and late for the school bus: never run faster than your guardian angel can fly.

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"That's daft, Mrs Hollis," he said, and laughed, and kept one eye on the clock.

I walked my round for thirty-one years in the same green coat and never once ran it. Running meant you had dropped something, or someone had gone poorly, or a dog had got out through a gate you should have checked. My father said a postwoman who hurried skipped the back gates, and the back gates were where the trouble always was. I knew every letterbox from the station to the water tower, and I knew which ones stuck.

On Friday the lad was late out of the bakery, which meant he was early for nothing. He stood on the platform with a parcel under his arm meant for the signal box, watched the 6.10 pull out without him, and I watched him slow to a walk, then stop, then sit down on the bench as if someone had finally let him in on the joke. He opened the parcel. It was a new pair of running shoes for his sister, with a note from their mum asking him to take it easy.

The next train came in eleven minutes later. We got on together, and I didn't tell him that I had waited thirty-one years to be right about something so small. I just sat by the window with my hands folded on my knees, the way you do when you have all the time in the world and no reason to hurry it.