Black script tattoo reading Love Never Fails beside an ornamental interlocking knot motif on a shoulder.

Love Never Fails script with ornamental knot

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words Love Never Fails in flowing black cursive script, running diagonally across the upper back. To the right, near the top of the shoulder, an ornamental motif of looping, interlocking shapes is drawn in bold black linework. The image is in black ink only, with soft warm lighting and the skin tone around the tattoo visible.

Lettering Shoulder Script Knot Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink is already thickening in the pot when Brother Anselm sets the quill in your hand and tells you the border must close without a seam. You have spent three winters on capitals and think you know what a seam is. He takes the page to the window and shows you the knot he drew in the margin of the psalter forty years ago, a looping star of four hearts, each threaded through the next so that no end can be found.

Keep reading

Above it, in a hand that leans forward as if running downhill, he has written the line from the letter to the Corinthians that the abbot reads at every wedding and every burial. Love never fails. You copy it three times on vellum scraps. Each time one heart slips past its neighbour and leaves a gap a child could put a finger through. Anselm laughs and says the gap is the lesson, that a knot is only as strong as the places where it refuses to be finished.

When the frost comes and the stove is lit only for matins, you finish the border alone. You draw the star with a steady hand, lift the pen at the last loop, and find you cannot lock it. Anselm is buried before Candlemas. You leave the final heart open, as he taught you, and bind the psalter with its margin unclosed so the next novice will have something to pick up.

On the flyleaf, small enough to miss, you write your own name beside the open loop, and go down to the cold refectory to eat.