Black lettering tattoo on the inner forearm reading "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul", in a plain serif style.

Two-line quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with two lines of black serif text tattooed along the skin, reading "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul". The letters are crisp, evenly spaced and solid black with no shading, and the lines run diagonally across the forearm toward the wrist. The background is dark and the lighting is dim, so the skin tone and surrounding details are muted.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Word

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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 Ardennes Star was three weeks out of Liverpool when the cook's mate found the book wedged behind the bread locker, its spine split and its pages gone soft with damp. You carried it up to the fo'c'sle because nobody else would read it, and because the watch below was long and the wind had gone round to the south-west and would not shift.

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The poem was on a page with a corner torn off. Two lines in a plain, heavy type, and under them a name you did not know, a man who had written his way out of a hospital bed. Ezra Leland, the cook said, reading over your shoulder with flour on his thumbs. Foolish thing to put in a book. A man can't be master of anything with the Southern Ocean in it.

But Mr Corran, the bosun, who had rounded the Horn four times and lost two fingers to a block, took the page from you and read it twice with his lips moving. Then he asked if you would copy it out in your best hand, because his own had gone to pieces on the cold nights. You wrote it on the back of a chart of the Falklands, pressing so hard the pencil tore the paper.

Off the Horn the sea came green over the rail and took the chart, the book and most of the galley stores, but Corran's copy had gone into his oilskin. He never mentioned the lines again. When the ship limped into Valparaíso in March he had you walk him to the shipping office, and he stood at the counter while the clerk stamped your discharge papers, one hand flat on the page as if it might blow away.