Close photo of a fine line black script tattoo reading this too shall pass on the upper arm of a person with long auburn hair, seen from behind.

Script quote tattoo on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black fine line script reads this too shall pass along the arm, angled slightly upward from left to right. The lettering is thin, even and monochrome, set against pale skin and a pale background. The subject is seen from behind with a grey sleeve and long reddish hair, and the tattoo sits in the lower half of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad's card hung on a nail above the range the morning the men came up from the Whitfield lamp room with their dinner tins under their arms, and it was the only thing in our kitchen that didn't smell of coal dust. He had written the words himself in pencil, big square capitals his own father had taught him, then gone over them in ink so they wouldn't rub off on the bread. Mam called it his rosary. Nobody was allowed to touch it.

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That winter we lived on broth made from bones the chapel ladies boiled down for us, and Tom came home from the picket line with a split lip and said the owners had brought a lorry of men from over the border to take the places of the ones who wouldn't go back. Dad sat in his chair with his boots still on and said nothing for a long time. Then he stood, took the card down, and read it aloud to the cold grate, slowly, the way you'd read a telegram. "this too shall pass," he said. "Your great-grandad said it when they carried his brother up in a sheet. He didn't mean the strike. He meant the grief. Don't go mixing them up."

Tom went back in March. Dad never forgave him and never stopped being proud of him, which I've come to think is the same thing in a mining family. The card went into the drawer with the rent book and the photograph of the choir. When the house was cleared after Mam died, I found it folded in four, the ink gone brown at the creases, and I put it in my purse without reading it again.

It's still with me. The square of wall above our old range is a shade paler than the rest, and I look at it on mornings when the news is bad. The paint around it has gone yellow with smoke, and that clean patch has outlasted all of us.