Black lettering tattoo reading "still I rise." in a typewriter-style serif on the inner wrist, shown in a black and white photo against a dark background.

Still I rise lettering on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the inner wrist and lower forearm with the words "still I rise." tattooed in black ink. The lettering is a solid, typewriter-style serif with a slight upward arc across the skin. The photograph is black and white with a dark background, and the text is the only focal point.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Wrist

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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

The carbon copies came off the Imperial at ten to five, blue and smudged, and Mr Cuthbertson stood over my desk holding the list as though it might bite. Forty-one names for the Thornfield dye works, all of them women who had stitched the shadow cloth since before the war. "Type them clean, Miss Hollis. Nothing else on the page."

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I typed them clean. Each name landed with its tidy clack, the bar rising and falling like a pump handle. Doreen Marsh. Irene Pollard. Joan Ashworth, whose hands had gone to knots in the spring. My own name sat near the bottom, and I kept my fingers moving past it because the machine did not care whose name it was. Under the list Cuthbertson had asked for one line of thanks, something to soften it for the Gazette, and I had sat with the sheet in the roller for a long time, waiting for the right words to come and find me.

They didn't come. What came instead was my mother at the copper on Monday mornings, steam in her face, singing something under her breath whenever the sheets tried to beat her. I wound the paper up a notch and typed the line she used to say, all lower case and no ceremony, the way a stubborn child spells. still I rise. The e-bar stuck and I had to coax it free with my thumb.

I left the sheet squared on his blotter and went down the stairs without my coat. By Friday the notice was pinned to every gate in the valley. Somebody had copied my last line onto the back of a pay packet, and somebody else had copied that, and by the weekend the women of Thornfield were walking to the bus with those three words folded in their purses, the full stop struck so hard it had cut clean through to the sheet beneath.