Two photos of black and grey script lettering tattoos on forearms, one reading Your Pain Is A Gift with flourishes and the other a quote with butterfly accents.

Script quotes on forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The top photo shows the words Your Pain Is A Gift in ornate script above a small symbol and two swirling flourishes on the forearm. The lower photo shows a three-line quote in cursive script with small butterflies and dots at each end, and a thin healing mark runs across the forearm beside the text. The ink is black and grey with clean, even linework against plain skin and a soft, neutral background.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Flourish Butterfly Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the Nell is tied up at Stoke Bruerne again, and Mam's lettering is still along the cabin side where she left it, the curly capitals gone soft with coal smoke. You'll laugh, but I've started reading them aloud at the locks. The lock-keeper's boy listens without interrupting, which is more than I can say for you.

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Last Tuesday a cloud of small blue butterflies came off the towpath and rode the gunwale for three miles, settling on the tow rope and the green paint, lifting off at every bridge as if they were counting them. Dad would have said they came for the sugar in the lock water. I didn't argue. I just let them ride.

I've kept a tally in the back of the ledger, one dot for every lock we've worked since the funeral. Forty-one of them, a row of little ink spots like the stepping stones he used to point at across the Trent when we were small enough to be carried over. Each one is a place where I put my foot down and didn't slip.

Yesterday the boy asked which saying on the boat was mine. I told him none of them, I'd only ever been the one holding the brush. So he took the stub of pencil from behind my ear, wrote something on the back of a lock chart, folded it into my coat pocket, and ran off before I could read it. I haven't unfolded it yet. The butterflies came back at Hillmorton, and this time I stopped counting them.

Yours, Jess