Small black script lettering tattoo on the upper arm of a woman wearing layered necklaces and an olive top.

Small script quote on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop shows a woman in an olive green low-cut top and layered gold necklaces, with a small black script quote tattooed on her upper arm. Only part of the text is visible, and it runs in fine, even lettering across several lines. The image is in natural light with a warm tone and a cropped composition that leaves the face out of frame.

Lettering Upper arm Script Quote Text Necklace Bracelet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ysolt, the stone for the procurator's widow came up from the quarry at Calcaria yesterday on two oxen, and I have spent the whole morning with my chisel and a dry brush laying out her line. She wants the letters cut so fine that none of them stands taller than a barleycorn, so the words look like ink on a wall rather than a shout. I told her that was a foolish thing to ask of limestone. She said that was why she was paying me in silver and not bronze.

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The words come from a scroll her husband's Greek secretary chose from a book of sayings. You have got the whole world before you, so go. I asked the widow whether she meant it as a blessing or a bitter joke, and she only smiled and said the boy would know which. The boy is her grandson, eleven years old, and he sweeps the shed where I work. He reads better than the secretary does.

I spent the afternoon on the g. A g cut badly looks like a man running backwards, and I did not want that on a monument that will stand by the road to the coast for longer than either of us. I held the mallet loosely and let the chisel do the walking. When I finished, the boy came and stood in the dust with his hands behind his back and read the whole line aloud, slowly, the way you taught me to read the mile markers.

He asked me whether the world was bigger from the top of the road or the bottom. I said I had never been to the top of the road. He nodded as if that settled something, and went back to his broom.