Two people sit side by side showing black fine line script tattoos on their upper backs, one reading Together forever, never apart and the other reading maybe in distance, but never in heart.

Matching script quotes on two upper backs

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare backs are shown side by side, each carrying a line of cursive script in black ink. The left tattoo reads Together forever, never apart, and the right reads maybe in distance, but never in heart, so the two lines read as one continuous pair. The linework is thin and even, the ink is solid black with no shading, and the soft black and white photograph sits against a table with paper cups in the background.

Fine line Lettering Back Quote Script Text Couple Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Two sisters, Mairead and Ottilie, grew up on either side of a hedge of white thorn that their father had planted to mark the boundary between the two farms. Nobody in the valley could remember a time when the hedge had not been there, and nobody could remember either sister crossing it without a quarrel. Their mother said the hedge was a fence with better manners. Each morning Mairead pruned her side and Ottilie pruned hers, and each evening they tucked notes for each other into a knot in the wood.

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When the spring the river rose, the mill-race took the bridge at Holm and the valley road lay under brown water for a fortnight. Ottilie had gone to the market town with the wool cart and could not get home. Mairead wrote on a strip of linen, Together forever, never apart, and pushed it through the thorns to the far side, where the postman's boy would find it. The reply came back on the first dry day in Ottilie's cramped hand: maybe in distance, but never in heart. Mairead laughed until she had to sit down on the step, because it was the first time her sister had ever answered her in full sentences.

The water went down. The bridge was rebuilt in oak. Neither sister ever did cross the hedge, though they walked along it every day of their lives, one on each side, reading out the lines to each other through the leaves. When Mairead died, Ottilie had the two sentences cut into the gatepost where the hedge met the road, one above the other, so that anyone coming up from the valley would have to stop and read them in order.