Fine black and grey script reading and they lived happily ever after, with faded butterflies and swirls, on the back of a woman's neck.

Happily ever after script on the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of the back of a woman's neck, with dark hair held aside by one hand. The tattoo is a cursive script quote, and they lived happily ever after, set over two lines with faded butterflies and fine scrolling flourishes beneath and to the left. The linework is thin and the shading is soft grey, with no colour ink.

Lettering Fine line Neck Quote Script Butterfly Swirl Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy's manuscript had reached its final chapter by the Tuesday, and Ada Coyle was the only compositor left at the Holloway press who could match her hand. The copy lay on the sloped desk under the gas lamp, smudged at the corners where the author had blotted with her thumb. Ada set the type a letter at a time, reversing each one in the stick, the way her father had taught her before his lungs gave out.

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The last line gave her trouble. Mrs Abernethy had written it three times down the margins, crossing out wed and settled and content, until only the old phrase was left, looped and underscored twice. Ada had read the whole serial through the winter. The prince had lost his horse, his crown and his nerve, and in the seventh instalment he had walked into a hedge of brambles for a woman who never once asked him to. She did not think they lived happily ever after. She thought they lived, which was not the same, and she suspected the author knew it.

Still, a compositor did not correct copy. She locked the forme, pulled the proof, and found the flourish under the word after had come out a hair too heavy, like ivy grown over a gate. She inked it lightly and pulled a second proof, then a third. On the fourth she left the line as it was, the ivy trailing down toward the margin where nobody would look twice, and she signed the slip for the foreman with the same neat hand she had learned from him.