Close photo of a fine line black script tattoo reading this too shall pass on the upper arm, with a white vest top and dark hand at the edge of the frame.

Script quote reading this too shall pass on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is the phrase this too shall pass written in a flowing cursive script across two lines on the side of the upper arm. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is a single dark tone with no shading or colour. The image is a close, slightly dark photograph with the text centred and a white sleeveless top and a hand with dark nail polish framing the composition.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Quote Script Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lantern, boy, and sit where I can see your face, for this is the part my mother told me off the Bay of Biscay and I've never told it sober since. Four months out from Valparaíso the Mary Ellen lost her foremast in a squall, and the second mate, a gloomy Cornishman called Abel Trewin, took to his bunk and would not come up. Nobody could coax him out with prayers or rum. The cook, a Shadwell lad named Tom Pilling, sat outside the door every night and read him a letter that was never his to read, written in a hand so looped it looked like the wind had done it.

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The letter had come from Tom's mother, who had tucked it into his sea chest with a clean shirt and no other advice. Three lines at the foot ran in that same swooping script: this too shall pass. Abel listened with his face to the planks, then laughed the sort of laugh that cracks a rib. "Nothing passes on this ship but time and the cook's soup," he said. Tom didn't argue. He only read it again, slower, the way you'd sing to a horse that's gone lame.

Then came the morning the gulls turned inland, and the whole crew felt it in their teeth. Abel came up the companionway blinking like a man let out of gaol and asked the carpenter for an axe. He spent three days shaping a jury mast from a spar meant for firewood, and when the sails filled again he stood at the wheel with his jaw set and never once looked back at the bunk.

We raised Falmouth on a grey Thursday. Abel went ashore with the letter folded in his coat, and I'm told he had the three lines inked along his arm in a Penzance parlour before the week was out, neat as a schoolmaster's copybook. Tom never saw it. He'd gone home to Shadwell to tell his mother the words had worked, which is more than most letters can say.