Black script lettering reading always in a flowing hand, tattooed on the top of a woman's foot near the ankle.

Always script tattoo on a foot

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a single word, always, written in black cursive script across the outer top of a bare foot. The linework is smooth and of even weight, with the letters sitting in a gentle upward slope. The ink is solid black on pale skin, and the frame also shows red painted toenails and a fabric surface at the edges.

Lettering Ankle Always Script Word Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the boats came in through the gap between the Skerry and the mainland, and every autumn Mairi Gow climbed the iron stair at Carrick Head to light the lamp. Her father had done it for thirty years before his chest gave out, and before him his father. The keepers all cut their names into the lintel, but Mairi wanted something the sea could not take, so she asked the minister's son, who had a steady hand and a box of sign-writer's brushes, to paint one word on the rail of the gallery.

Keep reading

He wrote it in a looping hand that slanted up toward the lamp: always. Nobody on the mainland thought it odd. Keepers painted mottoes all the time, and the lighthouse board had long since stopped minding what went on the railings.

The winter the Ellen Jane went missing, Mairi kept the light burning through three nights of sleet with her eyes on the water. On the fourth morning a single oar washed up below the rocks, and by noon the Skerry men had found the rest of the crew clinging to a broken hull at the mouth of the bay. They had seen the beam the whole time. Old Hector Blair said afterwards that he had steered by the light and by nothing else, because the light had not once gone out.

Mairi never repainted the word. When the rail rusted and the boards were replaced, the new rail was painted plain, and the old one was kept in the store room with the wicks and the spare glass. Men still say that if you hold a lamp to the grain of that old wood you can read it, the letters leaning toward the sea as though they had somewhere to be.