Black script lettering reading Leaving behind my minor life for grander maybes, with small underline flourishes, on skin at the side of the hip above a patterned fabric strap.

Script quote tattoo on the side of the hip

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a three-line quote in black cursive script, with small looped flourishes beneath the first and last lines. The lettering is set with even spacing and the strokes look smooth and solid, with no shading or colour. It sits on smooth skin in a close crop, with a patterned, multicoloured fabric strap running across the top of the frame.

Lettering Other Quote Script Text Flourish

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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

Right, you'll want to sit down for this, because the committee has put me at the front and I've never once in forty years told a story sitting. Doris Pilling is the one you're all looking at, and you can stop, because this isn't about her. It's about the Tuesday coach to Carlisle and the girl on it with a cardboard suitcase tied shut with washing line.

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Her name was Nessa Grey, and she'd written the line on the inside cover of her geography book in biro, pressing so hard it came through onto the next page. Leaving behind my minor life for grander maybes. Mr Haworth found it when he collected the books in, kept it three weeks, then handed it back folded and said maybes was doing a lot of work for a girl who couldn't spell her own postcode.

She didn't come back for the wedding, or her mother's funeral, or the year the chippy burned down. People said she'd gone to London to be an actress, then to Leeds to nurse, and then nobody said anything, which in this town is the same as saying she'd been forgotten. I used to think the sentence was a boast. Now I think it was a list of things she meant to be cheerful about losing.

Last spring a parcel came to the post office with no return address. Inside was a tea towel, the old Coronation one, and stitched into the hem in green thread were those same three lines, the little curly tails underneath, and a laundry tag in her handwriting that said Keep. Nobody here knows what it means. I've decided it means she's still out there somewhere grander, and still maybe.