Black script lettering reading 'What doesn't kill you. Only makes you stronger' across the side of a hip and upper thigh.

Script quote tattoo on the hip

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of black script lettering in two lines across the side of a hip and upper thigh. The words read 'What doesn't kill you. Only makes you stronger', with fine, even linework and solid black ink. A hand with a ring and a white waistband appear at the top left, while the background is dark.

Lettering Thigh Script Quote Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter turns up on the third night out, wedged behind a tin of ship's biscuit in the lamp locker, folded small and gone soft at the creases. It is addressed to a Mr Thomas Halloran, care of the Cormorant, which is your ship, so it has been sitting in the dark since before you signed on at Gravesend. The bilge pump knocks under the deck like someone wanting to be let in, and you hold the paper close to the lantern to read it.

Keep reading

It is from a woman called Edie Sayers, who keeps a chandlery in Falmouth. She writes that her father's leg has gone black at the toe and the surgeon has stopped coming round, that her brother is back from the Cape with a cough he cannot shake, and that the rent is owed. Near the bottom, underlined twice, she has written: What doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger. Her mother used to say it over the washing copper, she says. Edie never believed a word of it, but she has come round to thinking people say such things so they have a reason to keep lifting the buckets.

You fold it back along its old creases and sit with it on your knee. Halloran was lost off the Horn in March, the purser told you, and nobody thought to clear his locker. Somewhere a woman is still waiting for an answer that no one on this ship has ever sent. Your watch bell goes. You tuck the letter inside your shirt, against your ribs, where it is warm.

At Valparaiso you buy a sheet of cheap paper and a pen that skips. You write in your own hand, which Edie will not know, and sign it Tom. The cough is the cough, you tell her. The rent can wait a week if the chandlery can. Tell your father the leg is his to keep. And tell your mother she was half right, which is more than most of us manage. You post it before you can change your mind.