Close photo of a black script lettering tattoo quote running along a forearm, with two people embracing in the background.

Script quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a single line of black cursive script that reads Everything I Wanted But Nothing I'll Ever Need, with the lettering running from the wrist toward the elbow. The linework is fine and even, with some soft shading, and the ink is entirely black and grey. The composition is shallow and dark, with the arm across the foreground and two people's heads and shoulders blurred behind it.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, I am writing this at the kitchen table of the lodging house in Barnsley, because the landlady has gone to chapel and left the range banked, and because I have never managed to say a plain thing to your face without it coming out sideways. Your father shook my hand at the pit gate on Monday and said nothing at all, which I have decided to take as a blessing.

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I have the list you gave me folded in my breast pocket. Bread, a tin of Cadbury's, the good grey wool for Mam's socks, and a length of ribbon the colour of the sea at Scarborough, which you have never seen and so described to me so carefully I could draw it blind. I bought all of it. I bought the ribbon twice, once for you and once in case the first one was lost in the cage with me, though the overman says the cage is the one place I am safe from losing anything.

What you asked me on the bank that night was whether I wanted the whole of it: the house on Dene Row with the blue door, the allotment, the wage that goes up every Michaelmas. I said yes, and I meant it. Then I went down the next morning and the roof talked to me the way it does, and I understood that a man can have everything he ever wanted and find it weighs nothing against the one thing he has no use for at all. Call it what you like. I call it the lamp going out and the dark being exactly as big as they said it would be.

Keep the ribbon. Wear it to chapel on Sunday and let the Hartley girls stare. I will be home by the Friday whistle, and if the cage is slow I will walk up from the pit head anyway and find you at the gate. Yours, Tom.