Fine line black script reading still I rise with an arrow, tattooed along the side of a torso above the hip.

Still I rise script and arrow on the side

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of the words still I rise in cursive script, with a thin arrow whose shaft runs through the lettering and whose head sits at the left end. The linework is fine and even, in a single dark ink with no shading, and the tattoo sits horizontally across smooth skin above the waistband of dark clothing. The photograph is close and softly lit, with the tattoo placed off centre in the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Arrow Script Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The morning the Hollin pit closed, my father sat on the back step with his boots still laced and his cap across his knees, saying nothing. Mam had already pegged the washing out in the drizzle, which she only did when she was too cross to stand still. I was nine, and I didn't know which of them I ought to be looking after.

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Mr Penrose ran the library out of the old schoolroom and kept his grandfather's fletching kit in a biscuit tin. The Saturday after, he sat me at a trestle table, showed me how to split a goose feather and bind it to a shaft with waxed thread, and handed me a fine nib. "Write something a person can hold on to," he said. I wrote the lines Miss Hadley had read us from the poem about dust and getting up again. Then, because he said an arrow ought to know where it was going, I drew a point at the left end and let the shaft run straight through the letters.

Dad never went back down. He drove a bread van for a while, then mended clocks in the church hall, and gradually he stopped flinching when the bus passed the headgear in the field. Mr Penrose pinned the finished arrow above the schoolroom door with a drawing pin, and nobody ever took it down, even after the library moved to the bus shelter and the schoolroom was sold for flats.

Last spring I took Dad over the bridge on the number nine. He pressed his forehead to the glass as we passed the rusting wheel, and when the road bent away from it he read the words under his breath, slowly, the way you might test ice. Then he tapped the window once, the way he used to tap the barometer, and said, "Still aiming, then."