Close-up of white ink lettering reading We're all mad here across an arm, in a fine lettering style.

White ink quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a single line of capital lettering across an arm, reading "WE'RE ALL MAD HERE". The letters have thin, flared serif strokes and are rendered in white ink rather than black or colour. The text fills most of the frame against plain skin, with a blurred patterned fabric at the left edge and a pale background on the right.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Quote Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are up the harbour wall before the rain has made up its mind, brush in your back pocket and a tin of white gloss wedged under one arm, because the new schoolmaster's boat is already a grey dot past the skerry and the letters along the seawall have started to go. Eleven winters of salt have taken the back of the W and the top of the final E. Nobody else on Skerrin will touch them. Your grandmother painted those words the spring after the gale, when the whole island spent three nights in the Fisherman's Rest and agreed it had been a perfectly sensible decision.

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Peter Haig comes up the slip with a suitcase in each hand and stops in front of the wall as if it has spoken to him. He reads it out under his breath, then again louder, and asks whether that's the island's motto or a warning. You tell him it's a forecast. He laughs, and then he sees you aren't joking, and the laugh folds up politely and goes back in his coat pocket. Behind you the gulls are working through the bins by the pier, paying no attention to anyone.

He asks why you keep painting it when nobody has asked you to. You say the gulls never read it and the weather doesn't care, but every child who comes off the ferry does, and each new one needs telling who on Skerrin is allowed to be odd without anyone sending for the mainland. He thinks about that for the length of a wave against the stone. Then he sets his cases down, pulls the lid off the tin with his thumbnail, and holds it steady while you dip the brush and start on the E, the rain beading white on the paint before it can run.