Black ink hand-lettered design on a white background reading Thanks for the pain, It made me raise my game, with small decorative dots and curls.

Thanks for the pain lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of two lines of lettering on a plain white background, reading Thanks for the pain on the upper lines and It made me raise my game below. The letters have thin, wobbly outlines with decorative swirls and small dot ornaments, and the text is staggered across the page, left to right and then right-aligned at the bottom. No shading or colour is used, and no body part is shown.

Lettering Text Quote Lettering Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Bed nine has been shouting at the ceiling since half eleven. The man in it has told me, in order, that his wife is a saint, that the Royal Mail is a cartel and that the sandwich I brought him is a crime against bread. I promise to pass the complaint on to the ward sister, which is a lie, because she went home at seven and I am the only one left on nights who can reach the drugs cupboard.

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Gladys in bed four is different. She is eighty-one, had a new knee fitted on Tuesday, and spent the afternoon with her eyes shut so the physios would leave her alone. At two in the morning she pressed the call bell and informed me she would not be needing a commode, thank you, because she had been a hairdresser in Dudley for forty years and knew a sales pitch when she heard one.

Getting her across the lino took ten minutes. She gripped my forearm hard enough to leave marks and swore at the frame at every step. At the sink she looked at her reflection, grey hair flat on one side, and said, 'Dreadful lot of fuss for a knee.' Then she tapped her chest with two fingers and recited something under her breath. I took it for a prayer until she said it again, slower: thanks for the pain, it made me raise my game.

At half six, when the day staff came in clattering their coffee cups, she handed me a folded tea towel from her bag. Yellow cotton, the words stitched in black thread with curly ends and tiny stars where the dots should be. 'Dreadful lot of fuss,' she said. 'But I'll get a better walk out of it than you will.'