Black script lettering in two lines runs across the outer thigh of a seated person in a grey hoodie holding a mug, with the tattoo partly cropped.

Two-line script quote on an outer thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A seated person in a grey zip hoodie and blanket holds a white mug, with the face and upper body cropped out of frame. A two-line black script quote runs along the outer thigh, with the wording partly cut off by the edge of the image. The lettering is crisp and evenly weighted, shown in soft natural light against a pale bedsheet.

Lettering Thigh Script Lettering Quote Mug

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ewe has been straining since before the light came up, and the yard is white to the gatepost, so you carry the lamp out with the kettle still ticking on the Rayburn behind you. Your father never liked you in the pens alone at night. He said a lamb could turn on anyone who did not know its weather. You are twenty-three now and have stopped arguing with him about most things, though not about this.

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Inside the shed the ewe is down in the straw, her flank heaving. A forefoot shows, but the head is turned back, and you have done this twice before, once with him standing where you stand now. You wash your arms in a bucket that has frozen at the rim. The radio on its nail is talking about road closures on the moor. You take a breath, feel for the joint, and ease the head round the way he showed you, slow and patient, because the mother cannot be hurried and neither can you.

The lamb comes in a rush of steam and blood and lies still, and for one long second nothing happens. You rub it with straw until it sneezes, then it is shaking its wet head and bawling at the cold. The ewe lifts her head and makes the low sound you have always thought of as a question, and you tell her she did all the work. No one writes the rules for a shed at four in the morning. Whatever you decide here, you decide alone.

At half six you walk back up the lane with the lamp turned low and your fingers stinging. The kitchen smells of burnt toast. You chalk the new lamb's number on the board beside the ewe's, and under it, because nobody else is awake to see, you write one line in pencil: master of my fate. Then you go in and tell him the lamb is up and sucking, and that you managed it yourself.