Small black script word Always with four asterisk-style stars beside it, tattooed on a shoulder in a sepia photograph.

Always script with stars on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo of the word Always in cursive script, with a descender on the y that extends below the baseline. Four small asterisk-shaped stars sit either side of the word. The ink is solid and fairly thin, set on pale skin against a cream wall, with a dark strap at the edge of the frame. The image has a warm sepia tone.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Always Script Star Asterisk Word

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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 tide tables came up from the mainland every second Thursday, folded inside the post bag with the paraffin and the tinned peaches, and Morag had learned to read them the way other women read the weather. She pinned this month's to the nail beside the kitchen door, under the calendar from the Co-op, and went out to the lamp room with her tea going cold in its tin mug. Ruaridh had always done the lamp. He had been gone four winters now, drowned off the skerry with the creel boat, and the lamp still needed trimming on the hour whether or not there was a man left to climb the stairs.

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She found his notebook in the drawer of the chart table on the first night of the autumn gales. Most of it was tallies of fish and sums of paraffin. On the last page, in pencil gone silver, he had written a list of the stars he could name from the rock, and beside each one a small mark like a cross. Under the list he had written a single word, pressed so hard the paper dented: Always. She sat with it a long time while the lamp turned its slow white arm across the water.

In the morning she walked the eleven miles of track to the far end of the island, where the postman left his bag on a flat stone, and she posted a letter to the agent in Stornoway asking for a second keeper. Then she came back the long way round, past the cairn, and when the sky cleared she lay on the warm rock with her sleeves pushed up and counted the stars Ruaridh had marked. There were four of them, bright enough to see before the dark had properly settled.