Two matching black script lettering tattoos on the inner wrists, reading It's Only Forever and Not Long At All.

Matching script quote tattoos on wrists

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two pale wrists are shown side by side, each with a black script quote. The left wrist reads It's Only Forever, with the ellipsis, and the right reads Not Long At All, with the words arranged in a stacked, slanted layout. The linework is smooth and even in solid black ink, with no shading or other colours, and the photograph is taken straight on so both lines of text are easy to read.

Lettering Other Script Quote Text Matching pair Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the fender, pet, and sit where I can see your face, for this is a true story even if the bits of it are kind to the Dunmore boys. Frank and Eli were cousins born the same February in Hollin Row, where the pit wheel turned day and night and every step was black by Sunday. When Frank took his first shift at Gaskell's Main, Eli sat on the wall and watched the cage drop with him.

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Frank shouted down the shaft, 'It's only forever, our Eli,' the way a lad says a thing when his stomach is still up top. Eli called back from the wall, 'Not long at all,' which was his way of saying he'd be standing at the pit head when the bell rang. That summer Auntie Bet's lodger, a man who inked sailors' anchors, pricked both sayings into their wrists with a bone-handled needle and a tin of soot. They sat on the back step laughing while the blood beaded up, as if it were nothing.

Frank went down on a Tuesday in the winter of the big drift, and the roof came in at the eleven-hundred level. Eli went to the pit head with his coat undone and his wrist pressed to his chest. He stood there all night while the lamps came up one by one, and each time the bell sounded he murmured the short line under his breath. Not long at all. The lodger's ink faded to blue over the years, but Eli still turned his left wrist to the lamp at every shift bell and read it, the way you'd check a clock you never quite trusted.