Black and grey italic script tattoo on a man's forearm, reading 'to thine own self be' with the end cut off by the frame, above a sketched line motif.

Script quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a man's left forearm, turned towards the camera, with an italic script line running up the arm from the wrist. Above the lettering is a loose, sketched outline drawn with thin strokes and light shading. The image is in greyscale with a shallow depth of field, a blurred railing behind, and a black leather bracelet and silver chain at the wrist.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Lettering Sketch Outline

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

The lamp at Skerrow Point had been dark for nine nights when the new keeper came out on the supply boat with a crate of brass and a temper like wet slate. I took him for a fool. Nobody sane came to a rock like that in February unless they were running from something.

Keep reading

He wouldn't climb the tower until he had read the logbook from cover to cover. Every keeper since 1889 had written a line on the night he took the light, and most of them wrote about the wind. Ellis wrote nothing for a week. Then one grey morning there it was in his careful italic hand: To thine own self be true. Beneath it he had sketched the lantern room with its glass split across like ice on a pond. I asked him what it meant. He said his father had quoted that line at every Sunday supper, usually while carving a joint he had burnt, and that he had spent thirty years trying to work out whether the old man meant it kindly.

The generator failed on the ninth night, as Ellis had known it would, because he had gone down to the engine house and listened to it the way a doctor listens to a chest. He did not reach for the spare. He lit the lamp by hand, one mantle at a time, with the wind shoving at the glass and the paraffin smell thick in the stairwell. The beam came round at half past three and swept over the black water and the boat that had been drifting towards the reef with its lights out.

Next morning he wrote a second line under the first. I didn't read it. I didn't need to. I watched him at the rail with the cold sun on his shoulders, and I thought the sea had never once asked him to be anyone but the man who climbed the tower.