Two matching black tattoos on feet, each with the word Always in flowing script and a solid stag silhouette with antlers.

Matching Always and stag tattoos on feet

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching tattoos sit side by side on the tops of two feet, each showing the word Always in looping script above a solid black stag silhouette with antlers. The linework is bold and the fills are solid black, with no shading or colour. The two designs are mirrored in placement, and the photograph is taken straight on with soft, even light.

Lettering Other Always Stag Antler Silhouette Script Matching pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had taken the lane again by the time Ada Breck trimmed the last of the lamp wicks, so we went out over the drowned hedgerows in the punt with the lantern wedged between our knees. The Guild gave every pilot a mark on the inside of the foot when they passed the water test, and ours were the same beast, a stag, because stags had known the high ground before the sea came up and so the stag was the one to follow. Mine faced right. Hers faced left. When we stood back to back on the bow, the antlers made a fence that the fog could not get through, or so Ada liked to say.

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The fog came in off the Wash on the third night of the autumn run, thick as fleece, and the bell buoy went quiet for reasons nobody ever explained to us. We had a boy aboard, seven years old, asleep under a tarpaulin with his mother's ring tied to his wrist. Ada took the oar and told me to keep the lamp up. I kept it up. I heard her call once, a short bright word, and then only the slap of water against the hull where she had been standing.

The Guild found the punt the next morning drifting against the church tower with the boy still asleep in it. They never found Ada. What they gave me was a stag-shaped brass badge and an instruction to report to the gatepost at dusk.

I still set the lamp on that gatepost each evening. When the fog comes, I keep my right hand on the rail, where my own mark sits under my boot, and I walk toward the sound of the bell until the ground turns solid. Her side of the fence is empty now, but the antlers still point the way home.