Dark distressed block lettering reading SUCK IT UP across a forearm just above the wrist, with a clenched fist at the top of the frame.

Suck It Up block lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a forearm and clenched fist against a green grass background, with the words SUCK IT UP in bold, condensed capital letters across the wrist. The letters are solid black with a slightly distressed, textured fill, and the clear edges of what appears to be a temporary tattoo film are visible. The composition is straight-on and centred, with the text filling most of the forearm.

Lettering Forearm Text Slogan

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mackerel came in so thick that spring that the boats from Mousehole to the Lizard stopped fighting over the shoals and simply hauled. Old Tom Carne ran the Morwenna out of Newlyn with a crew of four, and he had painted the same four words on the wheelhouse board the year his wife died, black and blunt, so that every man at the wheel read them before he read the sea.

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Jory was sixteen and new that season. On the third night the net fouled on the winch drum and took his hand with it, and he sat on the hatch cover making a noise like a gull. Tom did not come over. He stood at the wheel with the lamp on his face and said, "Suck it up, boy. Fish won't wait for you to finish howling."

Jory swore at him, wrapped his hand in a sail rag, and hauled. He hauled until the sun came up grey over Mount's Bay and the hold was so full the boat sat low and sulky in the swell.

Back on the quay, Tom's hands shook so badly he could not light his pipe. Jory saw it and said nothing. That was when he understood the words had never been an order to the boy. They were what Tom had been telling himself since the funeral, painted where he would see them every time he steered. Years later Jory put the same words on his own boat, and when people asked what they meant he said it was the only order he had ever managed to follow.