Black script lettering reading Pain is inevitable suffering is optional, with fine flourishes, across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Script quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a healed or fresh black script tattoo on the upper back, reading Pain is inevitable suffering is optional over two lines. Flourishes and swashes extend from the ends of the lines, and the strokes are fine and fairly even. The ink is black and grey on pale skin, and the text sits diagonally across the shoulder blade area against a plain background with a mirror and a dark top.

Lettering Back Quote Script Text Flourishes Swash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the stove, boy, and don't touch the brass till your hands are warm, or you'll leave prints on it that I'll have to polish off by morning. Right. You want the winter of the cracked lens. Everyone wants that one.

Keep reading

The gale came in off the Atlantic the Tuesday after Michaelmas, and it took the glass out of the north lantern clean as a cork from a bottle. Wind through the gallery like a train through a tunnel. My husband Wilf was already two months in the churchyard by then, and the relief boat wouldn't come for six days. I could have sat in the kitchen and wept over the stove the whole week. Plenty did, in their day. Pain was coming, that was never in question. The sea does what it does, and the rock doesn't move for anybody.

So I went up the iron stairs every four hours with a tin of paraffin and a sheet of tarpaulin, and I wrapped that lamp against the weather myself, cursing Wilf the whole way up for leaving me the job. Twice I near went over the rail. Nobody made me climb those stairs, mind. I'd have been within my rights to sleep. The suffering was the sulking, the bit where I told myself the sea was personal. I put that down on the third night, and the work got lighter.

When the boat finally came, the young officer asked how I'd kept the light burning with no glass. I said I'd simply decided it was going to burn. He wrote it down as if it were a procedure. You'll see the words carved over the door when we go out. Wilf's hand cut those letters, fine and a little uneven, and it's the only thing of his I never tried to fix.