Black lettering tattoo reading i came. i swam. i conquered. in a condensed typeface across the inner wrist and forearm, with a raised fist and a lake behind.

Three-line quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised fist shows three lines of black lowercase lettering reading i came. i swam. i conquered. set in a narrow, evenly spaced typeface across the wrist and forearm. The ink is solid black with clean, crisp edges and no shading. The background is a blurred lake with grass at the bottom edge, and the text sits centrally in the frame.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Lettering Fist Lake

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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

The bell on the drowned chapel had stopped by the time you reached the reeds, and Marjorie Penhale was already a white cap bobbing halfway across the cut. Nobody on the shingle had bet on her. Nobody had bet on you either, which you decided was the only advantage you needed. Behind you the walls of Carrick Hollin stood open to the sky, the keep long since rolled down the bank into the water, and the island beyond them looked close enough to touch and was not.

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You swam with your chin up and your mouth shut, counting strokes the way your father had taught you to count rungs on a ladder. Halfway, the cold found the place under your ribs and sat down there. You thought about turning back, about the kitchen and the tea going stewed on the hob. Then you thought of the stone steps on the far side, cut by the old lord's men, and the carved words over the arch that nobody in the village could read anymore. Marjorie was waiting on the bottom step when you hauled yourself out, water running from her plait, grinning as though she had built the place herself.

Under a skin of green lichen, the lintel bore a row of letters worn down to shallow grooves. You scraped at them with her hairpin until you could make out a shape, then a word, then a whole line that made Marjorie snort. She said it was cheating, that the stone had had four hundred years to say it. You said the stone had only ever been waiting for someone to get there first.

She took the pin back and pressed it into your palm, pointing at the grey water where the shingle was a thin brown line and the way home was a long, cold distance. You cut the last word deepest, the way you would want it read by whoever came after, and then you both went down the steps and into the lake again.