Two matching forearm tattoos with black bird silhouettes, blue, teal and pink watercolour splashes, and the words Choose to keep going and this too shall pass beside a semicolon.

Matching semicolon and bird tattoos with watercolour

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two side-by-side forearm tattoos show black bird silhouettes, one with the words "Choose to keep going" and the other with a semicolon and the words "this too shall pass". Both pieces use black linework for the text and birds, with loose watercolour-style splashes in blue, teal and pink behind them. The composition places the two designs in mirrored positions, so they read as a matching pair.

Forearm Bird Semicolon Watercolour splash Quote Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has sealed the Crooked Hart since Tuesday, and the lane to Gillfoot is a white wall nobody is climbing. You are behind the bar, counting the last of the sherry, when Nan Ashdown comes down the stairs with a shoebox under one arm and sets it in front of you without a word. Inside are letters, forty years of them, tied with string gone grey.

Keep reading

Every one is from her sister Ruth, who left for the coast in 1961 and wrote each winter from a different boarding house. Most of them end the same way, a line underlined twice: choose to keep going. The ink has bled into the paper in places, as though the pen pressed hard. You read them by the fire while the rooks sit on the churchyard wire outside, a row of black marks waiting for the thaw.

The last letter is short. Ruth says the sea has taken the boarding house and she is cold, and she has stopped at a full stop, then drawn a small curved line beneath it that could be a comma or a hook. Nan watches you turn it over. 'She never finished that sentence,' she says. 'I always thought she was waiting for me to finish it for her.'

Outside the wind drops, and the snow stops for the first time in days. You fold the letter back along its crease, lift the shoebox onto the shelf above the bar, and pick up the pencil. Beneath Ruth's mark you draw a neat semicolon, then write after it, in your own careful hand, the words this too shall pass, and leave the rest of the page clean for whoever comes in next.