Black script lettering tattoo on an upper arm reading: our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean.

Wave quote lettering on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a quotation tattooed in flowing black script across the outer arm, reading 'our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean'. The lettering uses fine, even linework with larger calligraphic capitals and a long underline swash beneath the final words. The ink is a dark blue-black on pale skin, set against a softly blurred background of shelves.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Wave Ocean Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chisel slipped on the third word, which is why the harbour wall of Ysmere still says world in a hand that looks half drunk. Nobody in the guild thought to correct it before the tide came in and Teodor Vance, the master mason, took his fee and went inland. I was left with the rest of the sentence, and the sentence was the trouble.

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The queen had ordered it cut after the Sundering, when the old city of Caddis slid under the grey water in a single night. Her steward wanted the words facing the sea in pale marble so that the people would remember how little they owned. I was Vance's apprentice, and I was given the long swash beneath the last word, the tail of the ocean line, because my hand was the steadiest in the yard.

Each morning I climbed the scaffold and watched spray lift off the breakwater. Wave after wave rose, curled and gave itself back to the sea, and I began to copy the strokes exactly: thick on the downstroke, thin where the lift came away. By autumn I could cut a wave faster than one could break. The steward called it vanity. I kept the final stroke for myself anyway.

In spring the sea took the word ocean clean off the lower course, leaving only the swash, a long dark curl that stops in the middle of nothing. Gulls land on it now. I go down most mornings with a rag and a pot of oil to keep the stroke black, though I know the water will have it back before the year is out.