Close-up of a black lettering tattoo reading family in flowing script, with the words where life begins and love never ends in small capitals beneath it.

Family script with quote lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

The word family is written in large, flowing black script that runs across the upper part of the image and loops off the right edge. Beneath it, the phrase WHERE LIFE BEGINS and LOVE NEVER ENDS is set in smaller, evenly spaced serif capitals, with a thin rule of linework linking the two. The ink is solid black and grey with soft shading in the letterforms, and the photo is a tight, straight-on close-up of the skin.

Lettering Family Quote Script Lettering Love Life

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bridge at Sallow Ford had one toll-keeper, and in the spring of the flood year it was Mab Corrigan, who kept her ledger by lamplight and her debts in her head. Everyone who crossed paid something: a coin, a song, or a true answer to a question she chose. Most paid in coin. Nobody argued with the river, and nobody argued with Mab.

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A man came one wet evening with a boy asleep across his shoulders. He had no coin. His wife was on the far bank, he said, and the new stone crossing downriver wanted papers for children he had never once been asked to carry. Mab asked the boy's name. Tobias, the man said, and then, after a pause, that his own name was Eli Harrow, and that he had not seen his brother's household in eleven years. She had heard the same story that morning from a woman selling onions, only the names had been different.

Mab took down the ledger, which held every crossing since her grandmother's day, and turned past the columns to the back board where old keepers wrote what could not be charged. Someone long dead had pressed a line into the margin, the ink gone the colour of weak tea: where life begins, love never ends. She had copied it as a girl, thinking it was a rule about the bridge. Eli read it over her shoulder and laughed once, then stopped laughing. She lifted the bar and told him the boy's name would do.

On the far bank a lantern was already swinging toward the water. Tobias woke as the planks rang under his feet, looked back at the toll-house, and asked whether Mab would be paid. She said she had been paid in full, and wrote nothing down.