Script quote tattoos on two forearms

Two brothers, Ronnie and Eddie Pryce, lived four doors down from the chapel in Hetton Bank, and their mam sang the same song every night while she wrung out the dolly tubs. You are my sunshine, she sang, though there was precious little sun in a pit village in February. Ronnie went down the colliery at fourteen. Eddie had the wit and the clean hands, so he went to Sheffield on a train ticket his uncle paid for.

For eleven years they wrote to each other on the backs of pay slips. Eddie's letters were all jokes about foremen. Ronnie's were four lines long and always ended with Mam's song, and Eddie wrote it back with one word changed, because he could never leave a thing alone. My only sunshine, he put, and Ronnie laughed at it in the lamp room where nobody could see his face.

Then the roof came in on the Number Three face in the spring of fifty-two, and Eddie was on the first train north. He found Ronnie alive, black to the eyebrows, sitting on an upturned tin bath with his lamp still burning on his cap. Ronnie pushed up his sleeve without a word. Eddie had paid a man on Division Street to write the first line there the week before, so it would ride down with him every shift. Eddie rolled up his own sleeve. They sat under the one lamp with their arms side by side, and neither of them said a thing, because the words were already doing the talking.