Black hand-lettered script reading Stop and breathe on a white background, a flash design with no body placement shown.

Stop and breathe lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the words Stop and breathe in black brush-style script on a plain white background. The lettering has tapered strokes and a looser handwritten feel, with the ampersand written in the top line. It is a black and grey design with no body part or skin visible.

Lettering Script Lettering Quote Ampersand Word

Find an artist for this

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

Dear Marguerite, the ferry was late again, so I sat on the harbour wall at Scalloway with the kettle-black sea slapping at the stones and wrote this on the back of a chandler's invoice, because it was all the paper the Shetland Bakehouse would sell me. Your mother's bread is still warm in my coat pocket. I am not writing to tell you about the boat. I am writing because you asked me, on the last night, how a man who had built three lighthouses could go so quiet, and I did not have an answer then.

Keep reading

The answer is that I stopped. The gales came down off the Atlantic in January and the lamp at Muckle Flugga would not light for a week, and every morning I went up the iron stairs and told myself to hurry, hurry, and every morning my hands shook so badly I dropped the spanner. A keeper's wife in Lerwick told me to stop, and breathe. I thought she was being soft. She was not. She had lost two sons to the water and she knew what hurry costs.

So I went up the stairs slowly the next day, one breath to each step, and the spanner did not fall. The lamp came on at dusk, a clean white flash over the rocks, and I sat down on the gallery floor and laughed like a fool. I hope you will forgive my handwriting. The ferry is in. I will post this from Aberdeen, and I will breathe the whole way home.