Close photo of a two-line serif text tattoo on the inner upper arm, reading Everything will be okay in the end, in lettering style.

Two-line quote on the upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows an inner upper arm with a two-line quote in a clean serif typeface, centred across the skin. The lettering is crisp and even, rendered in a single dark ink that reads as grey or purplish black. A teal sleeve sits at the left edge and a window blind softly blurs the background.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold Tully had set type for thirty-one years at Garrow and Lisle on Dale Street, and he could read a forme backwards faster than most men read the paper the right way round. On the Thursday the proofs for the Seacunny almanac came up with a gap at the foot of the last page, a space two lines deep where the editor had wanted a verse about the tides. Mr Lisle paced the stone with his hands behind his back. "Something short," he said. "Something a sailor can carry in his pocket."

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Harold chose the serif face they kept for the good work, the one with heavy stems and hairline feet, and he set the lines by hand from the case, the sorts cold and faintly sour with lead. Everything will be okay in the end. He paused over the second line longer than he needed to. If it's not okay, it's not the end. He had not written it. His daughter had said it at the kitchen table the winter the Marlowe came home with half her crew missing, and he had laughed, and she had not.

The proof came back with a pencil mark in Lisle's cramped hand: Too glum for an almanac. Cut. Harold did not cut it. He inked the forme himself, pulled three sheets on the hand press before the foreman arrived, and slipped the one with the lines to the top of the pile for the binders.

The almanac went out to two thousand ships. Eleven months later a envelope addressed to the works arrived from a bosun in the Bay of Bengal. The page had been pinned above a galley table through a gale off the Cape, he wrote, and someone had added a word beneath it in pencil, which he had copied out in capitals so there could be no mistake. Harold read it standing by the stone, then went to the case and began picking out a fresh line of sorts for the next forme.