Matching love quote tattoos on forearms

You paint the first half in black enamel, a fine script with a tail on every capital, and then the two red hearts, loops that overlap like rings on a bollard. The brush has a belly of paint and you have to lift it off the board before the hearts close up. Nell's boat leaves on the Tuesday ebb with her bag stowed under the wheelhouse and a pot of the same black lashed to the rail, because she says the stern will need touching up by March.

The gale in February takes the Sally Ann's mooring chain and drops her onto the breakwater, and the harbour master's men haul her in with her transom scraped to bare wood. You are on the wall with your ladder and your sable brush when she comes up the slipway, and you do not say anything. You only point the brush at the stone beside the slip, where you have already painted the second half in letters as tall as your arm, starting with the ellipsis, so that the first thing she sees is the dots of a sentence still waiting for its beginning.