Black script lettering reading "We accept the love we think we deserve" on a forearm, shown in a close photo against a red and blue background.

Script quote on the inner arm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a two-line script quotation tattooed along a person's arm, reading "We accept the love we think we deserve". The lettering is a flowing, connected script in solid black ink with smooth, even strokes. The skin tone is warm and the background is blurred, with red and blue tones at the edges of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Quote Script Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top at Calloway's has sprung three leaks since March, and the canvas smells of tar and wet sawdust, so when Mrs Ivy asked me to repaint the banner over the gate I said yes mostly to be out of the rain. The old banner had faded to a grey ghost. Underneath it, in a hand I'd know anywhere, was the line Ned Varley painted there the summer before he ran off with the Morecambe ferry money: We accept the love we think we deserve.

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Nobody on the show ever knew what it meant. Ned was always quoting something out of a paperback he kept in his coat, and we all just nodded and went back to mending rigging. I used to think it was the kind of thing a man says to make himself sound wiser than the ropes.

I scraped the banner down to bare wood on Tuesday. Under the old paint, smaller, in pencil, someone had written my name, a date, and a question mark. I had no memory of it. I sat on the ladder for a long time with the scraper in my lap.

On Friday I painted the new banner in plain white capitals and left the old words off. The circus closes in October. Mrs Ivy has already sold the elephant. Each morning I still climb the ladder to check the rigging, and sometimes I stop halfway and read the grain of the wood where the line used to be.