Black and grey photo of the words So it goes and a small starburst tattooed on the inner forearm, in a clean fine line lettering style.

So it goes lettering and starburst on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words So it goes. in a plain sans-serif typeface, with a small eight-spoke starburst below and to the right. The linework is thin and even, with solid black ink and no shading. The pale skin of the inner forearm fills most of the frame against a soft grey background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Text Quote Starburst Asterisk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the slate roofs since dawn, and Ada Marrow was still wrestling the tarpaulin over the fish trestles when old Tobias Penrose climbed onto the iron bollard to tell the market its fortune, as he had every wet Thursday since the war. Nobody paid him. They came for the hot chips and stayed for the forecast, which never changed. 'Rain, then more rain, and if we're lucky, a bit of sun for the funerals.' He rapped his stick twice on the iron. 'So it goes,' he said, and the market said it back to him, the way it always did.

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The gap at the far end of the row had been Nell Penrose's stall for thirty-one years. She sold charts, sextants, brass things nobody needed, and she had stopped coming in the spring without saying why. Tobias never spoke of her. Ada only found the box when she cleared the stall for the council man, tucked beneath a stack of yellowed maps: a cracked brass compass, its face scratched with eight thin spokes radiating from a centre pin, and a slip of paper reading, in pencil, Give this to whoever is still standing here.

She carried it down the wet row and set it on the bollard beside his stick. The needle shivered, wandered, then swung hard toward the empty gap and held there, trembling, while the rain drummed on the awnings. Tobias looked at it for a long time. He did not look sad. He looked like a man who had been waiting, patiently, for a small thing to point the right way.

'So it goes,' he said again, quieter, and tucked the compass into his coat. Ada went back to her trestles. When she glanced up, the bollard was bare and the gap was still wet, and the rain kept on falling on everything that was left to stand.