Black fine line tattoo of the word always in flowing script above an ornate Deathly Hallows symbol, shown as a close-up on skin and on a woman's thigh.

Always script and Deathly Hallows symbol on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel is a close-up of a black fine line tattoo in which the word always flows down a vertical line into an ornate Deathly Hallows triangle, circle and vertical line, framed by swirling scrollwork. The right panel shows the same design on the outer thigh of a woman standing in heels in front of a bookshelf, with her face and upper body cropped out. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, set against a plain skin background.

Fine line Thigh Always Deathly hallows Script Triangle Circle Scrollwork Wand Leg

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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 down, the lot of you, and stop pulling at the lamp cord, because the old ones never take kindly to a draught. Now. You know the three gifts. Everyone on Carrick Ring knows them, the way you know the hum of the reclamation vents. A length of ash that answers only to the hand it likes. A stone pulled from a dead moon, which brings back what you lost, though only as a shadow that sits at the table and says nothing. And a grey cloth so fine the light goes round it like water round a post.

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Forty years back, a girl called Meret Dunstan came up the lift from the lower decks with a ring-shaped scar on her palm and no interest in any of it. She wanted the cloth. Her brother had gone out along the cargo spine and not come back, and she meant to walk out after him unseen. The tinker who kept the stall, Oswin Vail, looked at her a long while. Then he drew a line on a scrap of lamp paper. The line ran down and dropped into three nested shapes, and at the top of it, in his cramped hand, he wrote one word: always.

"That's the price," he said. "Not the cloth. Nobody pays for a thing like that. You carry the word until you find someone who needs it more than you do."

She went out on the spine with the cloth over her shoulders and found her brother in a dead bay, mending a seal with his teeth. She gave him the cloth. Then she stayed with him, and the two of them walked back in together through the vents. Nobody wrote down what she did next, but the scrap of paper stayed folded in her boot, and it came out again every time a hard decision needed making.