Black and grey script tattoo reading with pain comes strength, with a swirl flourish and two shaded dumbbells, on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Strength script and dumbbells on upper chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the upper chest, near the collarbone and shoulder edge, showing the words with pain comes strength in flowing script with a swirling flourish above. Below the lettering sit two shaded dumbbells drawn with grey tones and soft edges. The image has a teal colour cast, and only the lower part of a face is visible at the left edge.

Lettering Chest Script Swirl Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the brazier, because I will not repeat the tale for latecomers. You want to hear how Dorcas the potter's daughter leapt farther than any man in Elis? Then hush, and listen the way she listened, jaw set.

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Her left knee had been broken under a cart wheel the summer she turned fourteen, and it healed the way a cracked jar mends, holding but never quite straight. The boys at the wrestling ground laughed at her hobbling. So she went up the hill road before dawn and lifted a pair of halteres, two blocks of grey stone the size of a child's loaf, each with a cord of sinew through a hole worn smooth by generations of other hands. Old Hermon, a retired wrestler with a nose like a fist, watched her from the olive stump. "The stone does not care whether you are sorry for yourself," he told her. "Swing it, or go home."

She swung. Every morning for a year she swung, and her knee creaked like a gate, and her palms split and healed and split again until the cords were dark with blood that she wiped on her chiton. At the games she stood at the pit with the weights hanging from her fists, rocked once, twice, flung them forward and launched herself into the air. The landing jarred her leg from hip to heel. She stumbled, the sand flew, and she knew before the judges moved that she had gone farther than the best of the men.

The scribe wrote "the potter's girl, a length and a half past Lysias" and then, in a hurry, left her out of the record entirely. That winter Hermon carved four words into the side of one stone with his knife: with pain comes strength. The stones still sit on a shelf in her father's shed, the letters scratched deep enough that the rain has never worn them away.