Black ink tattoo on the inner forearm of a tombstone-shaped outline with a small cherub at the top, grass at the base, and the words EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT in capitals.

Tombstone quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a tombstone-shaped outline with a small cherub at the top and tufts of grass along the base. Inside the outline, the words EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT are set in capitals across five lines. The linework is fine and uniform, filled in solid black with no shading or colour, and the design sits centred on the forearm against a dark background.

Lettering Forearm Tombstone Cherub Grass Quote Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night before they pull the Pavilion down, you are still sweeping chalk dust from the sprung floor at a quarter to midnight, because Dolly Kersey would have had the place swept by now and you have never once beaten her to anything. Her silver shoes are still under the upright piano where she kicked them off in 1974, and nobody has had the heart to throw them out, so you leave them where they are and keep the broom moving around them.

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She taught you the slow foxtrot on this floor when you were nine, one hand flat between your shoulder blades, counting aloud until she told you to stop. 'The music counts you,' she said. 'You only have to let it.' Forty years of Thursdays and she never once let you lead, only corrected your heels. When the stonemason rang about her headstone, he read out the wording she had left in a sealed envelope marked for your attention, and you laughed so hard he asked whether you were all right.

It was a line she used to sing off-key during the last waltz of every Christmas dance, pinned on the cloakroom wall in capitals for thirty years: EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT. You told yourself she meant the hall. You knew she meant the hall and her husband and the bruised Saturdays, and that she had decided, as she decided most things, to have the last word cut into granite.

At one in the morning you switch off the lights, leave the shoes on the piano, and set the radio on the windowsill at the one station still crackling through. The first bars of a slow foxtrot come through the static. You step out alone, counting nothing, and let the old boards take your weight.