Fine line black script reading we're all mad here running along the inner forearm of a pale arm against a light background.

We're all mad here script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a thin, handwritten script tattoo reading "we're all mad here" across the forearm. The linework is fine and uneven, with varied letter heights and a slight slant, and the ink is solid black. The arm fills the frame diagonally against a plain pale grey background, with the text sitting in the centre of the image.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell-ringer's girl came down Cutler Street at ten past midnight with a lantern in one hand and a hen under her arm, because the hen had got out again and nobody else in the house would go after it. The lamps along the river wall were going dark one by one. The council had sold the oil in the spring, her mother said, and the men who should have trimmed the wicks were drinking the money at the Swan.

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A man sat on the wall with his boots hanging over the water, counting the lamps that were still lit. He had a coat too big for him and a cap with a torn brim, and he looked at the hen as if it had come to complain about him. "Out late," he said. "Out late, and the lamps going. Are you mad?"

"I'm sent," she said. "Are you?"

"We're all mad here, love," he said, and he tipped his cap at the hen as though it had said something clever. "The trick is being mad with a light in your hand." He held out his palm, and she gave him the lantern, and he lit every dark lamp along the wall with a match that never seemed to burn down. Each one he named for a street, and each street, when its lamp came up, showed a window she recognised: her own, her mother's, the Swan with its door open.

She found the hen asleep in a coal bunker at the foot of the steps. When she came back up, the wall was empty, but the lamps were burning and the lantern sat on the top step, full of oil it had not had before. The bell at St Anne's struck five. Her mother was already at the kitchen door, and she said nothing at all, only took the hen and looked at the lantern for a long time before she hung it on its hook.