Close view of a fine line black script tattoo reading I am because you were along the inner forearm.

Script quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a handwritten style script phrase reading I am because you were, running diagonally across the inner forearm. The linework is thin and even, in black ink with a little soft shading on the letter strokes. The skin is shown against a white textured cloth, with the phrase filling most of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Quote Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last night of Hallam's bakery on Cross Street, Ilse was up a stepladder past midnight, scraping her grandfather's name off the fascia. The old enamel had lost its gold but the brushwork underneath had outlasted thirty winters of rain, and when the blade lifted the final curl of the H, she stopped and held her breath, as if the letters might mind being seen.

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She came down with paint in her cuticles and sat on an upturned crate in the dark shop. Tucked in the drawer of the bench was his old lettering notebook, its cover soft as cloth. On the inside board, in the same slanted hand that had signed every sign in the street, he had written a line she had never heard him say: I am because you were. Beneath it, smaller, he had added Nell, the morning she said it, the shutters half up and flour on her wrists.

Ilse had always assumed the phrase was his, a bit of wisdom he'd pulled from a calendar. Now she understood he had been carrying her grandmother's words around like a spare brush, ready for the day a sign needed them. He had never been a man for speeches. He wrote the things he couldn't say on the inside of covers and then went back to the work.

At first light she mixed a pot of white, climbed the ladder again and began to paint the new owner's name across the board. Her hand was steady until the W, where she paused, dipped the brush and added a thin hairline under it, the way he always had, and she let the old gold show faintly through the paint beneath.