Black fine line script reading This too shall pass across a woman's upper shoulder, with her face cropped out of the frame.

Script quote tattoo on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a woman's upper shoulder and collarbone shows the words This too shall pass in black cursive script. The linework is thin and even, with the letters running diagonally from the neck towards the upper arm. The photo is in colour with a plain cream wall behind, and the skin tone and dark grey top keep the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Script Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the guy ropes, because the wind off the marsh has been listening all afternoon. This is the tale of Ezra Hallam, goldsmith to a king who had everything except a quiet night. The king sent for him one wet autumn and said, make me a ring that cheers me when I am low and sobers me when I am proud. Only one thing does both, Ezra said, and he went back to his bench with the commission sitting in his chest like a swallowed stone.

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He tried. He set a ruby the size of a sparrow's egg, and it only made the king boast. He carved a laughing hare, and the king wanted it bigger. Then a lamplighter's girl came to the back door selling wicks, and while he counted her coins she said her mother always told her the same thing when the bread ran out and the rent was due: this too shall pass. Ezra forgot his wicks and his gold. He sat down with a stylus and a scrap of vellum and wrote the words in the looping hand his master had beaten into him, the letters leaning like smoke in a draught, and he made the band so the words ran round and round without a stop.

The king wore it through the year the river flooded the lower town, when his only son fell sick and his best horse broke a leg in the Dean's meadow. Each time he turned the band and read the words, he found he could breathe a little easier. Years later, when the king was an old man with a thin neck and a thinner temper, his physician noticed the ring was worn smooth on one side, where the thumb had worried at it so long the letters had nearly gone.

The ring went to a pawnbroker after the old king died, then to a dragoon, then to a gambler who lost it to our own strongman over a game of dice. So it goes. Pass the hat along, and if anyone asks where the ring is now, tell them it has gone round just as it promised. Mind the step on your way out.