Black lettering tattoo on an upper arm spelling the word Always, with the letters replaced by symbols including a triangle with a circle, a wand, a lightning bolt and a snake.

Always lettering with symbols on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells out the word Always using bold black symbols in place of some letters. The symbols include a triangle with a circle and vertical line, a thin wand, a ring-like motif, a lightning bolt and a serpent shape. The solid black linework sits across the upper arm against a warm, softly lit background of wall and framed pictures.

Lettering Upper arm Always Lettering Triangle Circle Wand Lightning bolt Snake Symbol

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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

The ferry from Skerrow Haven had not carried a passenger since the spring gales, so when Ada Lund rowed out to the grey ketch with a bundle of ash wood and a shuttered lamp, the harbourmaster asked her what she thought she was doing. She said she was going to fetch her father home. He had gone past the mark on the long crossing, the one where the sea turns the colour of pewter and the gulls stop following.

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The old women of the quay had told her what to take. A ring of hammered tin, to close the water behind her. A slim stick of ash, to make a path where there was none. A twist of salt from a lightning-struck rock, to wake whatever slept under the swell. And a serpent's tooth, for the thing that would ask the question. She kept them in a tin box with a sprung lid, and when the sea went black at noon she opened it and did as she had been told.

The serpent rose beside the boat with a head as wide as a barrel and asked what she had come to buy. Ada answered as the women had taught her: always, she said, the one who waits pays the toll. The sea cracked open with a laugh like timber splitting. Her father stood on a black rock in the middle of it, grey-bearded and bewildered, gripping an oar as if he had only just stepped off the boards.

She did not bring him home by the ash path or the tin ring. The ring only holds what you are willing to give up, and she had already decided she was not giving him up. She rowed him back the way she had come, with the lamp lit and the salt spilled over the side. He sat in the stern the whole way, quiet, and when the lights of Skerrow came up out of the murk he said her name the way he had when she was small enough to be carried.