Small black serif lettering reading So it goes. on the upper arm, just below a rolled grey sleeve.

Serif quote on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo of the words So it goes. in a serif typeface, set across the upper arm. The lettering is crisp and solid with no shading, and the text is centred in the upper part of the frame. The skin is warm toned and the background is dark, with a grey sleeve rolled above the tattoo.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cloakroom at the Marine Ballroom was a hatch the width of a tea tray, and I ran it for eleven summers with a tin of brass tokens and a ledger nobody else ever read. Coats in, a numbered disc out. Most people came back for theirs before the last waltz, flushed and cross about the time.

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The ones who didn't, I wrote in the back of the ledger. Ada Pryce left her husband's overcoat folded on my counter one wet October in fifty-three and went home in her gloves. His trawler had gone down off the Dogger that week. Beside her name I put down what Mr Lomas, the band's trumpeter, always said when a dancer told him bad news between sets. It was never more than two words and a shrug. So it goes.

I didn't understand the shrug until the night the band packed up for good. Mr Lomas leaned his trumpet case against my hatch and asked for his coat. I handed over his disc. He turned it over, read the number I'd stamped, and looked at the brass as though it had cheated him. Then he laughed, said the words again, and walked out into the rain without his collar up.

I closed the ledger that night and sat with the pen over the page for a long time. In the end I wrote his name at the bottom, and under it, in the same careful hand, the two words.