Black script tattoo of the words 'The pain you feel today... is the strength you feel tomorrow' across the lower back, just above a waistband.

Script quote tattoo across the lower back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script quotation tattooed in two lines across the lower back, with the text running slightly diagonally across the skin. The linework is fine and even, with soft grey shading where the ink settles into the skin. The image is almost entirely black ink on skin, framed by a grey top above and a grey waistband below.

Lettering Back Quote Text Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Orla kept the ferry on the Carrow firth for forty-one winters, and she never let the boat leave the slip without a word to the oars. "Pull now, and the water pays you back," she would say, and the children of Skell Point learned to say it before they could spell it. Her granddaughter Meg thought it was only the sort of thing old women said, like wrap up warm or mind the step.

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The winter Orla's wrists swelled like knots in wet rope, Meg took the oars for the dusk crossing. The blisters opened before the second bend of the water, and by the lighthouse they had soaked into the wood. Meg sat in the stern with the lantern hooked above her and wanted to throw the oars over the side. Painted on the shed wall in faded white capitals was the saying her grandmother had lived by: the hurt of today is the reach of tomorrow. Meg read it again and spat on her hands.

A midwife was waiting on the far shore with a bag of instruments and a woman labouring in a farmhouse above the reeds. Meg rowed through a fog so thick she steered by the sound of gulls and the smell of tide weed. When she bumped the far jetty, the baby was already crying up the hill, and the midwife said the mother had asked for the ferry girl by name.

At dawn Meg tied off at Skell Point. Orla was on the slip with a flask of sweet tea, and she looked at her granddaughter's hands for a long while. They were raw, then they were not. Orla took the oars and turned them over, feeling the new ridges with her thumb. "There," she said. "Now you're one of us."