Two people seen from behind, each with a black script quote tattoo on the shoulder blade: on the left "I'll love you forever", on the right "I'll like you for always".

Matching script quotes on two shoulders

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the upper backs of two people, with heads cropped out of frame. Each has a single line of black script lettering on the shoulder, reading "I'll love you forever" on the left and "I'll like you for always" on the right. The linework is fine and even, with the ink sitting in soft, slightly blurred black on warm skin, and the subjects are placed side by side across the frame.

Lettering Shoulder Script Quote Matching tattoo Two people Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You copy the lines onto the back of a rent book at the kitchen table in Gwen's Boarding House on Marine Terrace, while the kettle ticks towards the boil and Nessa pretends not to watch you over her cup. You write I'll love you forever in your careful schoolroom hand and then stop, pen hovering, because she has said she wants the second line to sound like her, not like a birthday card. She has always talked lightly. You have always taken her seriously.

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The shop on Harbour Street smells of antiseptic and the chip fat drifting up from the café below. The tattooist, whose hair is the colour of rust, reads your scrawl twice and holds it up to the window. "Which word's the second one? Like, or love?" Nessa laughs from the chair. "Like. For always. She's been practising the joke since Tuesday." You had not practised anything. You had simply written what came, and then you had been too proud to cross it out.

Outside afterwards, the wind pushes grit against the sea wall and the gulls hang over the harbour as if they have been paid to watch. Nessa asks whether you meant the mistake. You tell her you were trying to write the same word twice and got tired of being exact.

She doesn't answer straight away. She takes your hand, cold from the air, and walks you back past the bandstand towards Gwen's, where the lamps are coming on one window at a time. You think that a line promising someone you will love them forever is a large promise, and that one promising you will like them for always is a much smaller one, and that you would rather keep the smaller one and mean every letter of it.