Black cursive script lettering on a plain white background, reading "I didn't give you the gift of life, life gave me the gift of you."

Script quote design, gift of life

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A two-line quote set in a flowing, joined-up script in solid black ink on a white background, with no body or skin visible. The linework is fine and even, with looped ascenders and descenders and wide spacing between the lines. The composition is centred and uncluttered, leaving generous white space above and below the text.

Lettering Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tent came down on a Tuesday in October, and you were the one who knotted the last guy rope because nobody else could be bothered to pretend it mattered. Mr Oswin stood in the mud with his hat in both hands and watched the canvas fold like a sheet over a bed nobody would sleep in again. You were nineteen and had never once been asked what you wanted to do with your hands.

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The wagon was the only thing still painted. Under the sign, in letters the rain had nearly taken, someone had written the name of a town you had never been to. Mrs Pell found you there that night, sitting on the step with a tin of peppermints and a pencil stub. She had found you too, eleven years before, wrapped in a horse blanket in the back of the same wagon, and she had never once let you feel it was a debt.

'I didn't have you,' she said, pressing the tin into your palm. 'I'd have been a poor mother and a worse clown. The road had you, and then the road gave you to me.' She wrote something on the back of an old playbill, folded it twice and told you not to read it until the train was past Peterborough.

The train was past Peterborough before you unfolded it. Her looping hand ran across the paper with the same flourish she used to paint on the ticket boards: the gift of life, the gift of you. Below it she had drawn a thin wire, very carefully, the way she once taught you to walk the rope, one foot placed in front of the other.