Two black script quotes with Roman numeral dates tattooed on a back and an inner forearm, with a chain bracelet worn on the wrist.

Matching script quotes on back and forearm

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two separate lines of cursive script lettering are tattooed on skin, one across the upper back or side and one along the inner forearm, each with a line of Roman numerals beneath it. The ink is dark blue-black with clean, even linework and no shading, set against warm skin tones. The forearm is placed in the lower half of the frame, and a chain bracelet with a watch sits on the wrist.

Lettering Back Forearm Quote Script text Roman numeral Date

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are on the edge of the bath at the Ferryman's Arms, the night before the wedding, and Maddie has your forearm across her knee as if it were a map she means to read. Ruairi has already traced the lettering in carbon, mirror-backwards in places, and the room smells of surgical spirit and the chips someone brought up from the chippy. "Four, two, twenty-eleven," she says, tapping the date. "The day we first swapped shifts, so don't complain." You don't complain. You watch the needle and count the gaps between her breaths.

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Your mum thinks it is tempting fate. Your dad says nothing, which is his way of saying a great deal. You have spent three years apart in a way nobody planned: her on nights at the infirmary in Carlisle, you on the rig out of Aberdeen, fourteen days on and fourteen off, the phone propped against the kettle at three in the morning. The line on your arm is the one you wanted, the honest one that admits the distance. Hers, the promise, Maddie has chosen for her own back, where she says only she will ever see it, and where you will see it every time she turns over in the dark.

The ink darkens and settles, and Ruairi wipes it with a green cloth and says it will look blacker in the morning. It does not, but you let him believe he's right. In the morning you stand in the vestry with your collar undone, and when she reaches you at the front of the church you lift your sleeve for the vicar before anyone can object. He reads it aloud, rather too solemnly, and the pews laugh. Maddie laughs loudest, then turns so the back of her dress falls open just far enough for you to read the line that only you have ever been allowed to see.