Two bare feet at a pool edge, each with black script lettering tattooed on the top, reading never gonna grow up and never gonna slow down.

Matching script quote tattoos on two feet

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet rest side by side on a tiled pool edge, with pale blue water behind them. Each foot carries black script lettering: one reads never gonna grow up with trailing dots, and the other reads never gonna slow down, with thin, even linework. The toenails have white tips, and the ink is shown in sharp focus against the skin.

Lettering Fine line Other Script text Feet Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Shingle Bay lido could agree on who started it, but by the summer of 1961 Ivy Marsh and I were known along the promenade as the pair who would not sit still. Ivy dived off the high board backwards and sang rude hymns in the showers. I swam lengths while the old men played cards on the rim and called out our times like racing commentators.

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The trouble began the afternoon a man from the council came up the steps with a clipboard and announced that the pool would close for resurfacing in September. Lifeguards over twenty-one, he said, were welcome to apply for the desk job in the café. Ivy read the notice twice, then folded it into a paper boat and launched it off the edge. "Never gonna grow up," she said, and kicked a spray over the sign so the ink ran into blue smudges. I laughed until I swallowed half the pool.

That evening we sat on the warm tiles with our feet hanging over the water and made a pact in borrowed biro. Mine would say slow down, because I was the one who always had to be told. Hers would say grow up, because she was the one who never listened. We argued over the spelling of gonna for ten minutes, and then we agreed that spelling was for people who had somewhere to be.

The council filled the pool with rubble in 1979. Ivy drove her van straight to the edge of the hole and sat there with her feet dangling until the foreman asked her to move along. I sat beside her and we watched the gulls pick at the crumbs of tile. Neither of us had grown up, and neither of us had slowed down, and for once the water was not there to argue about it.