Ink Beneath the Skin: The One Word I Would Carry Forever

If you had to get a tattoo right now, what would it be and why?

Ink Beneath the Skin: The One Word I Would Carry Forever

If I had to get a tattoo right now, I would not choose a name, a date, a quotation or an elaborate symbol. I would choose a single word:

“Still.”

A small word, almost austere in its simplicity, yet capable of carrying an entire philosophy of life.

Still means many things. It means quietness, but also continuity. It suggests something that has not been swept away by the storms around it. A tree may bend in a tempest and still remain rooted. A lamp may flicker in the wind and still give light. A human being may be bruised by life and still choose to rise the following morning.

That is the tattoo I would want—not merely an ornament on the skin, but a reminder etched into the body of something the mind too easily forgets.

Life has a peculiar habit of taking away what we once believed indispensable. Years alter our faces, circumstances rearrange our priorities, people enter and leave, ambitions change their names, and yesterday’s certainties become today’s questions. Yet, somewhere beneath all these alterations, there remains a quiet self that whispers: Continue.

Still.

The word would remind me that endurance is not always heroic. Sometimes it is simply getting out of bed when the heart would rather remain beneath the blanket of yesterday. Sometimes it is opening a book when the world has become too noisy to read. Sometimes it is writing one more page, taking one more walk, listening to one more piece of music, or watching the evening sky without demanding an explanation from it.

I have always believed that the most profound battles of life are fought without witnesses. No medals are awarded for surviving disappointment. No applause follows the private decision to begin again. Yet those invisible victories often constitute the architecture of character.

Perhaps that is why I would not choose a tattoo that declares I conquered. I would choose one that quietly says, I remained.

There is something deeply Indian in this idea. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of steadiness amidst the turbulence of circumstance—the sthita-prajna, the person whose wisdom is not easily shaken by pleasure or pain. One need not proclaim such steadiness; one must cultivate it. A tattoo, then, could become less decoration and more a personal sutra—a thread of remembrance worn close to the skin.

And why the wrist, perhaps?

Because the wrist is where time is measured.

Every glance at it would become a small encounter with the past and a quiet instruction for the future. The word would sit there like an old friend:

Still here.

Still learning.

Still hopeful.

Still creating.

Still becoming.

Age, I have learnt, is not merely a number accumulated by the calendar. It is a library of departures, discoveries, mistakes, recoveries and unfinished sentences. The temptation is to believe that certain chapters have closed permanently. But perhaps life is less like a book with numbered chapters and more like a river—always moving, occasionally changing its course, never entirely abandoning its source.

So, if I had to get a tattoo today, I would choose neither rebellion nor vanity.

I would choose remembrance.

One word. Four letters. A lifetime of meaning.

Still.

Because the greatest declaration is not that life never wounded us.

It is that, despite everything,

we are still here.