Black script lettering reading I'd Rather Die On My Feet Than Live On My Knees runs across the upper arm in lettering style.

Script quote lettering across the upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a two-line phrase in flowing black script across the inner upper arm of a muscular arm, with the text set on a slight diagonal. The linework is fine and even, with solid black strokes and little or no shading. The pale skin tone and soft, even lighting keep the focus on the lettering, which fills most of the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Script text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The salt ship Marigold was twenty-six days out of Lisbon when the new mate came aboard with a ledger and a key to the spirit locker. Tobiah Penrose, the cook's boy, watched him walk the hold counting casks and crew, writing each name in a column as though a man were just another barrel to be tallied and stoved.

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The hands bent to him. They hauled the sheets and scraped the pitch and said sir when they meant something else. By the tenth day old Mattie Rowe, who had rounded the Horn twice, was on her knees scrubbing a boot print the mate had left on the planks, and nobody spoke of it. That night the cook sat Tobiah on an upturned bucket and told him about a bosun's grandfather at Bantry who had been ordered to kneel to a Dutch factor. The old man spat, brushed his coat, and said he would die on his feet before he lived on his knees.

The storm came up off the Azores on the thirty-first night. Lamps swung and the sea came green over the rail, and the mate, who could not tell a reef knot from his own bootlaces, ordered Tobiah up the foremast in the dark. Tobiah climbed to the first crosstrees and saw the mate below with a belaying pin in his fist and a look that said kneel. Tobiah did not kneel. He held the shrouds and stood on the ratlines until the watch came up through the hatch one by one and stood beside him.

The mate was put ashore at Falmouth with his ledger and his key. Tobiah still keeps the salt-stiff boots he wore up that mast, and when the bell goes for the dog watch he stamps his feet on the deck just to hear them.