Close-up of a small fine line script tattoo reading "so it goes." on the side of a person's torso, in dark ink on pale skin.

Small script quote "so it goes." on the side of the torso

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small handwritten-style phrase, "so it goes.", is tattooed in a single line across the skin. The letters are finely drawn with even, thin strokes and a looped, cursive character. The ink is dark brown to black on a soft, sepia-toned photograph of pale skin, with the composition centred on the text.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Quote Script Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's older than the chapel, and so am I. Sit down, Auntie, and let me tell you about the Brough sisters, because this is a wedding and a wedding wants a story with a sad middle.

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Their father kept the bell at St Oswin's for forty years, and when the flood came up the valley in the spring of nineteen-oh-seven, he went down to the ringing chamber to save the rope and never came up again. Edith, the eldest, wrote every name of the drowned on a slate and hung it by the lychgate. Ruth, who was seven, asked whether the water had been cold. Edith told her yes. Then Ruth asked whether it had hurt, and Edith said she did not know, and that was the first time anybody in that family had admitted it out loud.

Years later Ruth married a carter from Kirkby Stephen who could not read a word of anything but the weather. On the morning of her wedding she sat on the chapel wall turning her ring round and round, and when Edith asked what on earth she was doing, Ruth said she was trying to decide whether she minded. Edith took her hand and said, so it goes, the way their father used to say it over a broken cup or a late train.

The carter loved her for sixty-one years. The ring went to the bottom of the beck when she was ninety, and nobody dived for it, and that is the whole of the Brough sisters. It is a fine thing to stand beside somebody through the rain and the weather and the water, even when neither of you can read the signs. So it goes. Now somebody pour the cider.