Fine line black script tattoo reading 'this too shall pass' running along the outer edge of a foot on sand, with a pink nail polish visible.

Script quote reading 'this too shall pass' on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on sand, showing a single line of black cursive script reading 'this too shall pass' along the outer edge, running diagonally from the ankle side towards the toes. The lettering is thin and even, with fine strokes and small flourishes on the capitals and descenders. The skin is warmly lit in natural daylight, and the sand in the background is soft and out of focus.

Fine line Lettering Other Quote Text Script Foot Sand Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Jonah had been at the oven since three, raking the embers from the brick mouth, when Mabel Quine came down the stairs with her boots unlaced and flour already on her forearms. The spring tide had taken the low field in the night, and the wheat that stood green at dusk was now a grey skin on the water. She looked at the trays of cooling loaves as if they had done her a wrong.

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All morning she muttered the same words under her breath, the ones about the sea. Jonah asked where she had them from. "My mother," she said. "Her mother had them from a salt seller who came up the coast road every autumn. They're not a prayer. They're what you say to a loaf that won't rise." She pressed her thumb into the dough until it sighed. "Water goes down. Sand comes back. Something always comes back up out of it."

Near eight, a boy from the mill came running with news. The tide had turned and left the lane dry, and a cart of the miller's sacks had washed up whole on the strand, stitched shut and dry as the day they were filled. Jonah wanted to know what the words had cost her, and Mabel only laughed and said they had cost nothing at all, which was why they were worth keeping.

She drew the first loaf from the oven on the peel, rapped its base with her knuckle, and set it on the sill to cool. Jonah took the chalk from the shelf and wrote the words on the slate by the door so he would not forget them. By noon the rain had washed the slate clean, the way rain does, and the loaf on the sill was still warm.