Two forearms with black script lettering reading Laugh as much as you breathe, Love as long as you live, and a small outline heart on the other forearm.

Script quote and outline heart on forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are pressed together with hands clasped. One forearm carries two lines of black cursive script, and the other carries a thin black outline of a heart. The linework is clean and fine, with no shading, and the image is entirely black ink on a light skin tone against a plain pale top and dark background.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Quote Script Heart Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the wet on the bench. Aye, that's the one. You'll want the true version, not the one the gulls tell on the quay. Mrs Hetty Crane kept the chandlery at the top of Fore Street, and she had a habit of writing things on herself in the ink she used for the rope labels, because paper went soft in the sea air and the sea took everything else.

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The summer her nephew Tom went off on the herring boat, she wrote him a line along the inside of her arm so she'd see it every time she reached for the scales: Laugh as much as you breathe. Love as long as you live. The lads laughed at her for it, and she told them those were the only sensible words she'd ever put on skin. Tom came back thin and quiet, the sea having taken his laugh for a fortnight, and he would not sit near the window.

Then one foggy morning he came into the shop with a little drawing of a heart folded in his fist and asked her to mark it on his own arm, down by the wrist where the pulse is. She said he'd have to hold still. He said he had held still on the water for a month and was done with it. She pressed her arm against his, the way the fishermen's wives leaned at the harbour gate, and worked the needle slow while the foghorn counted out the hours.

When the fog lifted, the heart was crooked and the words had smudged where her hand shook. Tom swore it was the finest thing in Cornwall. Every fair day after, the two of them sat on the harbour wall with their arms touching, reading the lines aloud until someone told them to hush. Hetty always said the trick was simple: you laughed first, and the rest of it followed.