Black script lettering reading "How long is forever? Sometimes just one second" across the outer upper thigh.

Handwritten quote on an upper thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of two lines of black cursive lettering tattooed on the outer side of a pale upper thigh. The words read "How long is forever?" above "Sometimes just one second", with the second line sloping gently downward to the right. The ink is a single dark tone on light skin, with plain background and soft natural light.

Lettering Thigh Quote Script Handwriting Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ilse kept the bell at the top of Harrowgate Pass, and every winter the snow came down so thick that the carters could not see their own mules. The bell was her grandmother's, and its rope had worn smooth at the height of a hand.

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One February a traveller came up through the drifts with no mule, only a cloth bundle and a cough. He asked how long the pass had been shut. She told him nine days. He laughed and said that was no time at all, and then he asked her, plainly, how long forever was. Ilse said she did not know, she had only ever counted bells. He said his wife had asked him the same thing at the ferry, and he had told her forever was a great deal of years. She had shaken her head and said no, sometimes it was just one second, the time it takes a door to close behind a person who is not coming back.

Ilse rang the bell all that night so he would have a sound to walk toward. Each stroke hung in the cold air, and she counted the length of each one, the way her grandmother had taught her. Near dawn the wind dropped and the pass lay open, grey and empty below.

In April a carter brought up a letter from the far inn, addressed in a careful hand to the keeper of the bell. It said only that the man had reached the ferry in time, and that his wife had been waiting on the landing, and that they had both stood there for a while without saying anything at all.