Close photograph of a fine line script tattoo reading With pain comes strength across the skin of the back in black ink.

Script quote reading With pain comes strength

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a single line of cursive script reading With pain comes strength, set horizontally across smooth skin. The letterforms use thin, even black linework with a slightly heavier stroke on the capitals and some looping flourishes. The tattoo fills most of the width of the frame against a warm, softly lit background with dark vignetting at the edges.

Lettering Fine line Back Script Quote Text Word

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, you lot. The boards at the Palais have a soft patch by the piano where the joists gave way in the flood of '47, and Ada Pring went through it in her good heels that same winter. Sit down, Stan, you're letting the draught in.

Keep reading

She was sixteen and came to the Saturday tea dances with her mother's shoes stuffed with newspaper at the toes. Every bar she trod on the bandleader's cornet, and every bar old Mr Hesketh at the door would shake his head and say the girl would never learn to lead. He had hands like kippers and a voice like a gate. He taught her anyway, in the cloakroom, counting under his breath while the coats swung behind them.

One Saturday in March her partner lost his footing on the wet boards, and her ankle went under him with a crack you could hear over the trumpets. She didn't cry. She sat on the bench with her foot up on a crate of lemonade and said, through her teeth, that the pain had to go somewhere, and it might as well go into her.

Hesketh came over with a cup of stewed tea and a pencil stub. He wrote on the back of a raffle ticket, then turned it round for her to read. With pain comes strength, it said, in the looping hand he used for the cloakroom tags. Ada read it, folded it small, and tucked it inside her stocking.

She was back on the floor by the spring dance. Nobody ever saw her limp again.