Close-up of a small black fine line script tattoo reading La vie est belle on the upper arm of a person wearing a dark top with a pineapple print.

Small French script quote on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a person's upper arm shows a small tattoo of the words La vie est belle in thin black script. The lettering is neat and evenly spaced, with simple linework and solid black ink. The arm fills the right side of the frame, with a dark pineapple-print top and a window at the edge of the background.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Odile, the bakery on the harbour road has finally let me paint its window, and I have spent three evenings deciding what to write across the glass. Monsieur Lemaire wanted his prices. His wife wanted her late mother's name. I told them both that a window should say something a passer-by can carry home in one breath, so I am writing out the thing you always said to me when the boats came in short and the nets were torn: La vie est belle.

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I did the first draft on brown paper, in the thin gold leaf I brought from Caen, and it looked like a wedding invitation. Too careful. Madame Lemaire stood in the doorway with flour on her forearms and said it looked like someone apologising. So I took the brush and went bigger, letters leaning the way you lean into wind, and the ink ran down the l of belle in a long drip. She laughed and said that was the bit she would keep.

Yesterday a girl of perhaps nine stopped on the pavement and sounded it out slowly, the way we did with the catechism. Lah vee eh bell. She looked up at me on my ladder and asked whether it was true. I said it was true on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she frowned until I climbed down and promised it was true on the other days too, provided someone took the trouble to notice.

I still have the brush you gave me. The handle is cracked where your thumb sat. I will bring it when I come to Honfleur in the autumn, and we can see whether the drip has dried.