Traditional style tattoo on a calf showing a black silhouette of a woman holding a magnifying glass, framed by the words THIS ABOVE ALL TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE and pink and yellow flowers.

Silhouette with magnifying glass and quote on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a woman holding a magnifying glass sits at the centre of the design, with bold black lettering arched above and below her in capitals. Pink and yellow flowers and yellow scrollwork form an oval frame, with the lettering and frame outlined in black. The mostly black ink is set against a pale skin tone and a blue patterned surface.

Traditional Lettering Calf Silhouette Woman Lettering Quote Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, you lot at the back, stop pretending you don't remember Miss Hebden's glass. She kept it in the drawer with the chalk, and whenever a boy swore he hadn't copied his sums she'd take it out. Nobody ever saw her hold it up to a face. She held it over the page, slow, the way you'd look for a hair in the custard, and she'd find the faint pencil ghost of the answer underneath the rubbed-out one. That was the whole trick. Everything true leaves a mark if you're patient enough to look at it sideways.

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Then the summer the Ashdown twins sold the church bell rope, she went round the village with the same glass and a notebook. People laughed. The vicar's wife said she was an old maid with nothing better to do. She went into every kitchen anyway, bending over the sugar bowls and the tax letters and the sleeve of the coat hanging on the back door, and by September she had the whole business written out in her small hand, every name, every date, every shilling.

She read it aloud at the harvest supper, standing on a chair because the hall had no stage. Nobody spoke. Old Mr Pryce got up and walked out with his cap in his fist. When she sat down, somebody asked why she'd bothered when she could have kept quiet and kept her invitations to the Christmas socials. She said Polonius had it wrong in the play, the old fool, that you could hide behind a good coat all your life. Her father had taught her the line, and she'd carried it ever since: this above all, to thine own self be true. Then she put the glass in her handbag and walked home. I still have her notebook, if anybody here wants to see the small print.