Black and white photo of a black script quote tattoo running along the upper thigh, partly covered by a hand holding dark fabric.

Script quote along the upper thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A hand holds dark fabric at the hip, revealing two lines of black script tattooed along the upper thigh. The lettering is a quotation in a cursive, slightly slanted hand, and the lines are cut off at the edges of the frame so the full text is not visible. The photograph is in black and white, with soft light on the skin and a plain pale background.

Lettering Thigh Script Quote Lettering Text

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the sign in the back of the caravan, face down under a tarpaulin that smells of diesel and wet rope. Someone has painted the words on the reverse of a tent card in a hand you know better than your own: the letters leaning forward as though in a hurry to be somewhere else. Your mother always wrote like that when the wages were late.

Keep reading

The Halloran and Bright Travelling Circus has not put up its big top since the spring the elephant died and the council stopped giving out pitches. Now there are four wagons, a generator that coughs on Tuesdays, and you, the last of the wire walkers, sleeping under canvas that lets the rain in at the seam nearest the bed. The rest of the company has gone to a holiday park in Skegness to sell candyfloss from a hatch.

You sit on the step with the card on your knee and read it twice. It is not a poster. It is a line she copied out for you the winter before she went into the hospice in Ipswich, about being made by love and undone by it in the end. She thought it was a joke, and then she could no longer laugh at it. Outside, the wind pulls at the tent ropes, and the empty ring holds the light the way a spoon holds milk.

You turn the card over and the lettering swims. You lace your boots, take up the balance pole, and walk out to the wire strung between the two poplars, where the frost has not yet lifted. Somebody has to walk it once more before the poles go for scrap.