Script quote reading I want to live not just survive
Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo
A close photograph of a two-line quote in thin black cursive script across bare skin, with a hand resting at the top of the frame. The linework is fine and even, with solid black ink and no shading. The text sits centrally with the top edge of dark clothing visible at the bottom of the frame, and the warm lighting softens the background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The snow had been down three days when Ada Pellow found the boy asleep in the lambing shed with his coat still buckled to the chin. She did not wake him. She stood in the doorway with the lantern and counted the ewes, nineteen living and two not, and when she turned round he was awake and watching her the way a dog watches a closed gate.
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"You'll catch your death," she said.
"Aye, missus. Keeping at it, I am."
She set the lantern on the bale. Keeping at it was what everyone on Scar Top said about themselves that winter, the way they said the pump had frozen again or the cart wheel had gone. Ada had kept at it for forty years and she knew the look of a person who had stopped expecting anything but the next feed.
Inside the farmhouse, above the range, pinned to the beam with a horseshoe nail, was a card in her late mother's hand. Ada took it down that night and read it by the fire as if she had never read it before. I want to live, not just survive. Her mother had written it the spring before the flood took the low meadow, in pencil, and never explained it.
In the morning she put the card in the boy's hand. "Read that," she said. He read it slowly, moving his lips. "What's it mean?" "It means get up and go and look at the sky," said Ada, and went out to break the ice on the trough.
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