Black and grey photo of two forearms held together, one with the word Always in cursive script and the other with After all this time? in serif lettering.

Matching forearm lettering tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are pressed together with the hands clasped, showing two separate lettering tattoos. The left arm reads Always in a flowing script with fine, even linework, and the right arm reads After all this time? in a upright serif typeface with a slightly heavier stroke. The image is black and white against a dark textured bed sheet, with a ring visible on one hand.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Word Quote Always Script Serif

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the grate, the lot of you, and keep your wet boots off my good rug. The snow has come over Hallow Fell and the ploughs won't reach us for three days, so you may as well hear something worth the wait. This is about Nell Ashdown, who kept the ferry house at Cold Ford, and the carter who walked in out of the blizzard the winter the river froze solid.

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He came through the door with his collar stiff with ice and one hand wrapped in a strip of sacking. He didn't speak until he had drunk two cups of her tea. It had been nine years since he took the mail coach south, leaving a promise scratched on the back of a fare ticket and no letter after it. Nell stood on the far side of the table, wiping a cup that was already clean, and asked him the only question she had kept back. Anything else would have been wasted on the weather.

"After all this time?" she said. He looked at the stove for so long that the kettle began to sing, and then he gave her one word, plain and steady, the way a man lays a stone on a cairn he means to come back to.

"Always."

Nell did not cry, because Nell never had, but she went to the back shelf and took down the ferry ledger. She turned it round on the table so he could see the nine years of crossings she had entered in her own hand, and at the foot of every page, in pencil gone silver with age, she had written the same word, one page at a time.