Two black ink drawings of tattoo designs in Elvish Tengwar-style lettering, one labelled Always and one labelled Love, on a white background.

Always and Love in Tengwar script

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two hand-drawn lettering designs on a plain white background, each with a small caption above it reading Always and Love. The letterforms are rendered in smooth, bold black linework with tapered strokes and small dot accents, with no shading. A thin red wavy line runs beneath the Love design, and the rest of the image is entirely black and white.

Lettering Always Love Lettering

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, love, the band's on their break and that urn has been stewing since eight, but it's hot. You'll have walked past the sign-writer's on Harbour Street, the one with the blue door and the gold letters going soft in the weather? Old Tobias Quill lettered every shopfront in this town for forty years. He'd learned a private hand from a battered book his grandmother kept, all hooks and curls and little dots like spilt ink, and nobody else in Saltcombe could read a word of it.

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Hetty Lusk came in one wet Tuesday with a page torn from a hymn book. Her Frank had gone out on the Margaret Ann and not come back, and she wanted one word written where the sea couldn't get at it. Tobias said ink fades, same as anything. She said she didn't care. So he dipped the nib, and the first word came out fine, but when he tried to lift the stroke it wandered off into a second word, the way a dog wanders after a smell, and he let it go. Always, and then Love underneath, leaning on a line like a fence post.

Hetty took the page home and pressed it inside the hymn book. Every Saturday after that she sat by the door of this very hall, handbag on her knees, and watched the couples go round. She never once danced. But the ink held. Tobias swore it was the only thing in his shop that never curled at the edges.

So when you're tapping your foot to the next one, love, mind that line under the word. Mind the step going out too. The tide's already in.