Black and grey shaded tattoo of two interlocking rings with script lettering and a date, on skin.

Interlocking rings with script names and a date

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two interlocking rings with shaded edges that give them a raised, metallic look. Script lettering runs around the bands, with one name on each ring and a date on the lower band, and small scrollwork sits beneath the rings. The image is a close, straight-on photograph in soft light, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Lettering Ring Script Date Name Scrollwork Swirl

Find an artist for this

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

Old Hob the smith at Thornmere kept his forge lit through every winter, and on the morning before the frost fair he was still hammering when Alfie Penhallow stood in the doorway with his cap in both hands. The rings were nearly ready, Hob said, without looking up.

Keep reading

Hob had been given two lengths of pale silver from a drowned man's watch chain and told to make them into one promise. He would not hurry. He bent the first band, then the second, and hooked them together so neither could slip free without the other. Ruth Carne had asked for them to be linked like that, and Hob thought it foolish, but the county paid well and he did as he was asked.

He cut the names with a fine graver, the letters curling like bramble along a gate. ALFIE ran round the first band and RUTH round the second, and beneath them, on the lower ring, he set the day they would be wed, written as numbers that looked more like a sum than a date. Little scrolls ran under the rings where the metal thinned. He shaded the edges with a file so the silver would seem to stand proud of the skin, and Alfie asked why it mattered.

On the wedding morning Ruth slid hers on first, and Alfie fumbled his, and the two bands caught and tangled exactly as Hob had made them to. They had to work them apart together under the church porch, laughing, while the bell rang on regardless. Forty years later the rings still hung on one nail by the back door, and nobody in that house ever took them down to see which one had been put on first.