Black and white photo of a fine line script tattoo reading Still I rise across the inner forearm of a woman wearing a striped top and a pendant necklace.

Still I rise script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a woman's forearm, turned towards the camera, with the words Still I rise written in cursive script across it. The lettering is drawn in thin, dark, even linework with no shading, and the tattoo sits horizontally near the wrist. The frame is cropped below the chin, showing a striped top, a pendant necklace and the arm against a plain background.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Text Quote Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come in under the tarp, the lot of you, before the rain takes your hats. Aye, you're wet already. Wet is only water. Now, the stall by the clock tower, the one with the green awning that never stays green. A woman called Nessa Pryce kept it, selling eels and cod and whatever the boats gave her. Every winter the river came up over the cobbles and carried off her stock. Three floods she lost. Three times the council man came with his clipboard and said, love, you'd do better to pack it in.

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She didn't pack it in. Each morning after the water went down she scrubbed the slabs with a yard broom and chalked her prices back on the board, and beneath them she wrote the same words in her fat black pen. Her father had taught her that a thing said plainly in the open is harder to knock down than a thing kept behind a door. Soon the market women asked what the words meant. She said it was a promise she kept to herself, and they laughed, and then one by one they started writing their own.

On the fourth winter the river rose higher than anyone had seen. At dawn the men came down to look and found the stall gone, the board floating in the gutter, and Nessa sitting on an upturned crate in the middle of the square, a kettle balanced on a camping stove, grinning like a fool. The chalk had washed to nothing. But one plank had snagged on the railings, and there, scratched into its wet grain, were the words: still I rise. So if you're soaked and tired and the council man is at your elbow, you know what to do. Now run along home, and mind the puddles.