Close photo of a script tattoo reading Family is forever with a shaded cross behind the word Family, on the side of the torso above a waistband.

Family is forever script with a cross

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo reads Family is forever in a flowing script, with a large looping flourish curving around the word Family. A soft, grey-shaded cross sits behind the lettering on the left, giving it a blurred, shaded look. The lettering is mostly black, with the word Family appearing in a bluish tone, and the photo is framed closely on the skin with a dark waistband across the top.

Lettering Other Family Forever Cross Script Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Queen of Halvary had me letter the Edict of Continuance on the last morning of the winter fair, which is how I came to be kneeling on cold flagstones in the Hall of Ledgers with a quill in one hand and a jar of lamp-black in the other. She wanted three words that would outlast her, and she wanted them to look as though they were still moving. Family is forever, she said, and then, because she was a practical woman, she added that the grey beneath must look like lamplight through a shutter rather than a thing carved in stone.

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I had the loop ready before she finished speaking. My master taught me that a long flourish is a promise made to the eye, and that its tail must return to the line it left or the whole sentence falls over. I drew the F so that its curl swallowed the first letters of the word and carried them up over the roof of the parchment, then let is sit low and small, as if embarrassed to be so plain. The cross I shaded with a dry brush, a breath of grey that the damp in that hall would bloom into a halo if it were ever left unguarded.

When the ink was dry she unrolled the sheet across the table and read it twice, the way you read a bill you already know is too high. Her sons had not shared a meal since their father's funeral, and each had taken to dining in a separate tower. She asked whether the words could be read from either end of the hall. I told her a good flourish can be read by anyone who has ever been lost. She laughed for the first time that week and sent the scroll north with a runner.

I was paid in salt and a pair of good gloves. Three days later I walked the north road home and saw the banner hung above the castle gate, the loop of the F turning in the wind like a rope that somebody had decided not to let go of.