Black silhouette of an adult lifting a child overhead with a script quote beneath, tattooed on the upper arm in black ink.

Silhouette of a figure lifting a child with script quote

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of an adult lifting a child overhead sits on the upper arm, with a line of black cursive script underneath reading "Your first breath took mine away". The silhouette has smooth, solid fill with soft edges and no shading, and the lettering is fine and handwritten in style. The image is entirely black and grey, with the arm shown against a plain blue shirt sleeve and a blurred striped background.

Lettering Upper arm Silhouette Child Figure Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's only good for the first hour, and I won't tell this twice. Pass the kettle. No, the other one, the one with the dent. There. Now listen, because the road gets long after midnight and you'll want something to chew on.

Keep reading

Her name was Ruth Calloway and she drove the Bitter Wash road when there was still a mail contract to keep. Thirty-one miles of nothing between the last well and the first town with a pump that worked. In the spring the dust came early, she was carrying a sack of seed and a girl named Mercy who was three days from being born, and Ruth had told her husband to stay home with the goats because she knew that road better than any man alive.

The baby came at a place called Sorrow Cut, where the rock walls close in and the shade lies flat. Ruth lifted her out herself, held her up against the orange sky so the light could see her, and the first breath she drew was a cry so hard it rattled the windscreen. Ruth laughed. Then she sat down in the sand and didn't get up again. She had known before the sun was fully up that something was wrong, and nobody could bring a doctor out that far.

Mercy grew up on the road with her father, who never once let her forget where she came from. Every morning he lifted her high over his head, same as Ruth had done, and said the words to her like a prayer: your first breath took mine away. He meant it as a loss and a gift both, and she never knew which one he meant until she was grown and drove that road herself.

Now that's where the story stops, and that's where you go to sleep.