Black script lettering tattoo reading 'this too shall pass' across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Script quote 'this too shall pass' on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script tattoo reading 'this too shall pass', with a flourished opening letter, set across the upper back near the shoulder. The lettering uses thin, even linework in black ink with no visible shading or colour. The tanned skin fills most of the frame, with a white cloth and dark hair visible at the top edge.

Lettering Back Quote Script Text

Find an artist for this

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

Your letter came on the Tuesday carrier, folded twice and smelling of the tin it had been kept in, and I read it standing by the woodstore with frost still on the lane. You want to know whether the flood took the lower orchard. It did. Mr Abbott's boy fetched the bees out of the willows with a sheet and a bucket, and we lost eleven hives to the water, but the queens held in the top boxes, and I have been splitting colonies since March to make up the numbers.

Keep reading

You asked too whether I had been back to the glass-maker's in Ashby. I have not. I still keep the brass plate he cut for Father, the one with the wavering capitals, in the drawer with the string and the spare keys. Each time I take it out to check the spelling I think of that last hard winter, when the rooks sat on the church roof for a week and nobody could say what the weather would do next. Father used to say his piece over his porridge, flat as a bread knife: this too shall pass. He said it about the price of wool, about the vicar's cough, about the morning the mill burned to the ground. I took it for a thing men said to avoid being asked how they felt.

I have come round to it, though not in the way he meant. The forest beyond the stile keeps its own counsel, and every spring it drops the old oaks' dead limbs and grows a new skin of bracken over them, so quickly you would never know there had been a storm. I walked the edge of it on Sunday with a bucket of sugar syrup and watched the swarm from the willows settle on a hawthorn no bigger than a man's hat.

Come in April and bring your pen. The brass plate needs a second line cut under Father's name, and I want your hand on it, not mine.