Close photo of a black lettering tattoo on the inner upper arm, reading three lines of italic text in a plain serif typeface.

Three-line quote on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads "may I never be complete", "may I never be content" and "may I never be perfect" across three stacked lines in a plain italic serif typeface. The letters are solid black ink with clean edges and even spacing, and the skin around them shows slight natural tone variation. The arm fills most of the frame against a dark fabric background, with the text running diagonally across the lower half.

Lettering Upper arm Text Quote

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the sawdust, it gets in your teeth. You want the story of the Corrigan Brothers' Travelling Marvel, the one that went bust outside Ludlow in the wet summer of '61? Then hush. Old Tobias Corrigan painted three lines on the inside of the ringmaster's caravan door in red oil paint, and every night for thirty years he read them before he lit the lamp. May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. Sounds like a sermon, doesn't it? It sounded like one to the bank manager too.

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The trouble came when the big top was finished. Tobias had the canvas patched, the poles straightened, the elephant's feet trimmed, every act polished until a child could see her face in the trapeze bar. Then one Sunday the tent stood perfect in a field of buttercups, and nobody came. Not a soul. He sat on the steps with his tea going cold and understood what the paint had been warning him about: a finished show is a show that has stopped breathing.

So on the Monday he took a hammer to the lion's cage, let the wind have the ring curtain, and sent young Nell up the rope with her ankle strapped in brown tape. The crowd came back, shouting, half of them to see the wreck. Tobias laughed until he coughed, and he said the line about being content had been a rotten joke right up until that week.

The circus folded at Christmas. The caravan door is in a barn outside Shrewsbury now, and the red lines have faded to the colour of weak tea. I still go and read them when I pass. Stand up, the lot of you, and read them with me. May I never be complete.