Black line drawing of a curling swirl, two arcing strokes and two diagonal lines above a handwritten phrase reading I am in control of my emotions, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Swirl and arcs with an affirmation line

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a bold black swirl at the upper right, with two thick curved strokes rising from a horizontal base line and two thinner diagonal lines crossing over them. The linework is solid and uniform, with no shading, and the image uses black ink on a white background only. Below the base lines, a handwritten phrase reads I am in control of my emotions.

Swirl Curve Arc Handwriting Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Saturday tea dance at the Winter Gardens had a rule nobody wrote down: you did not let your partner see you lose your temper on the floor. Iris Pettifer broke it every week, stamping whenever the lead turned her too early, and I watched a month of it before I said anything.

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I took her to the back room, where the wartime chalk diagrams still clung to the wall, arcs and slanting lines marking where feet should fall. I drew a long diagonal across the board and told her to follow it with her eyes, not her knees. "Your feet listen to your face," I said. "So give your face something sensible to do." She copied a sentence onto a card in biro, slowly, letter by letter: I am in control of my emotions. It looked absurd, a schoolgirl's pledge pinned above a mirror, and she laughed at herself, which was the first useful thing she had done all month.

The following Saturday she came in with her shoes in a paper bag and the card folded in her purse. The band played a slow quickstep, the floor was packed, and halfway through a turn a young lad trod on her hem. I saw her go rigid, then loosen. She rode the spin out wide and clean, a long unbroken curl across the boards, and the lad apologised twice without her needing to say a word.

Afterwards she found me by the cloakroom and held out the card. The biro had smudged, but the words were still legible. "Keep the board up," she said. "I'll be back Thursday." That night I wiped the chalk arcs off the back room wall, thought better of it, and drew them again.