Black hand-lettered text reading WHATEVER YOU DO in three lines on the inner upper arm, against a pink background.

Whatever you do lettering on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is three lines of black capital letters in a hand-drawn, slightly uneven style, reading WHATEVER YOU DO with the words stacked and centred. The linework is uniform and fine, with solid black fill and no shading. The arm, wearing a white sleeve, is set against a plain pink backdrop with the lettering as the clear focal point.

Lettering Upper arm Text Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You'll want to hear how the keeper's wall came to say what it said, because that wall is the only part of Hyskeir anybody remembers properly. Old Calum Rennie had the brush in his hand the winter the boat stopped coming, and nothing to paint with but the black tar they used on the gate hinges. So he wrote on the whitewash above the stove, and the letters came out fat and uneven, because his fingers were cold and his temper was worse.

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Three lines, he told his daughter Isla, who was nine and sulking in the corner about the lamp oil. Stacked, mind, because the plaster was narrow and the stove pipe ran right through the middle. WHATEVER. YOU. DO. He would not say what he meant by it. He just climbed back up the tower to watch the light, and left her to work it out with the soot.

Isla grew up, took the first boat that would have her, and learned to weld in a yard on the Clyde. For thirty years she sent home postcards with nothing written on them but the date. Then one February a letter came in her own hand, and it said only that the stove was still there, and so was the wall.

She drove north in a borrowed van with a tin of tar on the passenger seat. When she reached the rock she stood where her father had stood, read the three black lines in the cold light, and found she had nothing to add to them. She just wiped the dust off the letters with her sleeve, and the lamp went round above her as it always had.