Black ink script tattoo reading Keep going on the inner forearm, with a small arrow and a small leaf or bird outline beside the lettering.

Keep going script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the inner forearm carrying the words Keep going in black ink, written in a flowing script with a slight slant. A small arrow sits above the lettering to the right, and a small outlined leaf or bird shape sits below to the left. The image is shot close and slightly soft, with a warm skin tone and a blurred background.

Lettering Forearm Script Arrow Leaf Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old carrier Marrow had been losing air for nine years when Ilse Tavenor was given keel-watch, which meant walking the cold spine of the ship each shift and listening to the pipes. Her grandmother said the first keepers had painted words on every bulkhead so the people would remember the way. The paint had long since worn away, but the habit of walking had not.

Keep reading

One shift the pipes went quiet in the wrong place. Ilse followed the silence to the seed vault, where a finch no bigger than her thumb sat on a frosted fern. Tucked under its feet was a sheet of paper folded into a plane, and on one wing someone had written in a looping hand: keep going. Nobody aboard knew how old the bird was, only that it had been carried since the launch year and that nobody had let it die, because nobody knew whether the ship would reach a place with trees.

She sealed the leak with tallow and a strip of hull plate, then carried the finch up eleven decks inside her coat. At the observation ring she opened the vent and held the paper plane out into the dark, then thought better of it and folded it into her sleeve. The stars out there were only numbers on the charts, and she had no wish to send anything ahead of her that she could not follow.

Eight years later the ship came down on a green shelf of water, and the first thing to grow from the vault soil was a fern. Ilse opened the cage, and the finch flew straight to the nearest branch and sang at the wrong hour, as if it had been waiting all along for someone to say the journey was done. The plane she pinned above the hatch, where the children could read the words whenever they asked what they were for.