Close-up of a fine line script tattoo reading "this too shall pass" in black ink across the upper chest near the collarbone.

"This too shall pass" script on the collarbone

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a handwritten script phrase, "this too shall pass", tattooed in black ink across the upper chest along the collarbone. The linework is thin and even, with the letters slanting to the right and the ascenders and descenders kept fine. The skin is pale and softly lit against a white top at the lower edge of the frame, which keeps the focus on the lettering.

Fine line Lettering Chest Quote Text Script Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The causeway floods twice a day, and my father never once hurried across it. He timed every crossing by the tide tables pinned inside the boathouse door, and when the sea was up he would sit on the bollard with his pipe unlit and wait for it to go down again. Mum said he was the only man on Scarr who had learned patience from the water rather than from the church.

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The winter the boats were lost off the north skerry, the parish sent us a new schoolmaster from the mainland, a thin man with a voice like wet paper. The children cried at the drowned names read out in the hall. Before the lesson I wrote the words this too shall pass across the slate board in the slanting hand my father had taught me from the backs of the tide tables, and the schoolmaster asked me who had said them. I told him my father did, every time the causeway covered.

He didn't answer for a long while. Then he rubbed the letters half away with his sleeve and wrote them again, smaller, in the corner where nobody would see unless they looked.

At low water the next morning I walked out to the causeway alone. The weed hung in dark ropes and the sand had the ridges the sea leaves when it goes. I stood on the stones until the first wet edge came creeping back across the planks, and I didn't run.