Back view of a woman with a small black lettering tattoo on her upper arm, partly legible French text, with her hand on her hip.

Small text tattoo on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her bare back and shoulders visible, her hair tied up and her hand resting on her hip. A small black lettering tattoo runs along the outer upper arm near the elbow, with only part of the French text legible. The image is mostly warm skin tones and a plain indoor background, with the tattoo as the only ink.

Lettering Upper arm Text Quote French text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways across Pike Street since seven, and by ten the awning over your stall is sagging like a wet sail. You are dragging a crate of enamel signs under the tarpaulin when a boy in a yellow cagoule stops and asks what the French on the blue one says.

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You tell him it says life is beautiful, because that is what the man in Calais told you when you paid him forty euros for it in a car park full of sellers, years ago. You have never checked. The boy frowns and says his nan reckons it means something closer to life is lovely, which is not the same thing at all. He asks if it's for sale. You say it isn't, and he says that's a shame, it would look good in his bedroom, then walks off into the wet without buying a single thing.

You stand a while with the sign in your hands. The paint has flaked at one corner so the last word has gone soft, and rain beads across the blue as if it means to wash the letters off. You think about the man in Calais, who may well have been lying, and about how many winters you have stood here reciting his sentence to people who never asked.

When the boy's nan comes past ten minutes later, pushing a shopping trolley with a broken wheel, you hand her the sign and tell her to decide for herself. She holds it at arm's length, reads it twice, and laughs. Then you take it back, wipe it on your coat, and hang it facing the road, where the rain can keep at it.