Black and grey photograph of the words you only live once in black script tattooed diagonally across the inner forearm.

You only live once script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close black and white photograph of a forearm and wrist with the phrase you only live once written in black handwritten script, running diagonally from the wrist towards the elbow. The lettering has smooth, fairly thin strokes with some looping joins, and the skin shows fine texture and slight sheen. The background is heavily blurred, with vertical shapes that suggest a window or blinds, which keeps focus on the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, you lot, mind the sawdust, mind the mud, and let me tell you about Ada Pilcher and the wagon with the painted sign. Sixty summers ago the Pilcher Brothers' Travelling Marvels pulled into Ashby Fen with a fortune teller who had no fortune to tell and a strongman who wouldn't lift a bale of hay. What they had was a single handwritten sign nailed above the ticket hatch, and on it, in a hand so thin you had to squint, the words: you only live once.

Keep reading

Nobody thought much of it. Folk paid their pennies for the Wall of Death and went home. But Ada, who sold the tickets and kept the books, read that sign every morning while she counted change, and it got under her skin the way a splinter does, slow and certain. She had been meaning to leave the fair for eleven years. She had a letter folded in her apron pocket addressed to a seaside town she had never seen.

Then the big top caught fire on a Tuesday, and in the scramble Ada went back for the cash tin, and the old barker went back for her. Afterwards the ticket hatch was all that stood, and the sign was black at one edge but whole. Ada opened the letter that night, read it by the glow of the embers, and posted it at dawn. She went to the sea. The sign went with her, and it hangs in a kitchen in Cromer now, I'm told, though I wouldn't swear to it.

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