Black script tattoo reading Family, Where life begins and and love never ends, with a swirl flourish, shown in two photos on skin.

Family script tattoo with swirl flourish

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads Family in large cursive script with a looping flourish above the letters, followed by smaller script reading Where life begins and love never ends. The lines are black and fairly fine, with some variation in weight. The first photo is a close, straight-on view, and the second is taken at an angle that shows the tattoo on a curved area of skin.

Lettering Other Family Script Quote Swirl Flourish Text

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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 man at the front of the queue had his passport open before my window had fully slid back, as if he had practised the gesture somewhere along the M20. Under the lamp I read the name, Tadeusz Wren, born in Gdańsk, and the address, a flat above a bakery in Calais where a tattooist kept her studio. Nights at Dover had taught me to read a person in the time it took to stamp a page, and he was not in a hurry the way lorry drivers are. He was careful.

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He asked whether I could spare a minute, and when I said the queue would forgive me one, he unfolded a card on the counter. Someone had written in ink, slanted and looping, the word Family with a swing of flourish above it like a kite string, and underneath, smaller, Where life begins and love never ends. The corners had gone soft from folding. His mother had written it on every birthday card he ever received, he told me, and she had died in March with the original still tucked behind her bathroom mirror. He was having it done on the inside of his arm, the same letters and the same loop, because he was the last one left who could carry her handwriting anywhere.

I thought about my own mother's recipe book, its margins full of arguments with herself. I didn't say so. I stamped his passport, the ink sharp and square, and asked him to mind the step down on the far side of the barrier.

He tucked the card into his breast pocket, then stopped at the barrier and pushed up his sleeve to look at the blue biro outline the artist had asked him to trace in the car. Across the gap I watched him read it twice, the way you read something you already know by heart.