Two people seen from behind, each with a black script quote tattoo across the upper back, one reading 'If there ever comes a day when we can't be together'.

Matching script quote tattoos on two upper backs

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two people are photographed from behind, each with a handwritten-style script quote tattooed across the upper back between the shoulder blades. The left quote reads 'If there ever comes a day when we can't be together...' and the right reads '...Keep me in your heart, I'll stay there forever.' The lettering is fine black linework with soft shading, set against a warm brown wall with a red sharps bin visible behind them.

Lettering Fine line Back Quote Script Handwriting Matching tattoo Two people

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Wenna had carved the sentence onto a willow tally in the autumn, the way the ferrymen at Sedge Hythe kept their count of crossings, and when the flood came in March the two halves of it went different ways. Ada took the upper half to the eastern dyke, where the water was rising over the sluice gates, and her cousin Tobias took the lower half north towards the abbey, because the bell had to be rung and nobody else knew the rope.

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The first sentence stayed in the wood. If there ever comes a day when we cannot be together, it read, and the letters had been burnt into the grain with a hot poker so that they rose like welts. Ada kept her half tucked inside her sleeve. Each night she held it to the lantern and counted the strokes of the bell she could hear across the marsh, and each morning she counted the water.

On the ninth night the bell stopped. Ada rowed out in the dark with the tally pressed to her chest and found Tobias on the bell-loft stair, his hands raw from the rope and his own half wrapped in a rag. He had not come down because the abbot had asked him to stay. Ada laid her piece against his, the two grains met in a clean line, and the words ran across the gap as if they had never been cut apart.

Keep me in your heart, the second half said, and I'll stay there forever. In the morning the water had dropped a hand's width, and the monks said it was the bell that had turned it. Ada never argued. She kept the tally on a cord round her neck, and when people asked what the words meant she told them to read both halves and then go and ring something.