Small tattoo on an ankle showing a parent holding a child as a blue and black silhouette, with Love you Forever lettering beneath.

Parent and child silhouette with script on ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised silhouette of an adult holding a smaller child, with the adult's hair and arm curving into a looped base. Below it, the words Love you Forever are written in a handwritten-style script, with the final word partly filled in blue. The figure uses solid black and blue-grey ink with soft shading, set against a close-up of smooth skin.

Lettering Ankle Child Silhouette Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learned the tide from your mother, who learned it from a pump man whose name is cut into the lintel above the door of the Saltmere pumping station, though nobody has needed his name since the wall went. Tonight the water stands at the third rung of the ladder, and Ada is asleep against your shoulder, heavier than she was at dawn, the way sleeping children always are.

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On the leads you find the old lamp the engineers left behind, its brass hook curled like a rope end on a mooring post. Below the lamp, the stone still carries the words your son's father cut the summer before the flood, using a borrowed chisel and a bad temper. LOVE YOU FOREVER, the letters crooked where he rushed the R. Last winter you filled the final word with blue lamp oil so it would show at night, and you have been topping it up ever since, because the salt takes everything else.

Ada wakes and asks you to read it to her. She goes slowly, sounding each letter against the cold stone, and stops at the blue word. The paint has gone pale where the spray reaches it. "Why's Forever the blue one?" she asks. You tell her the lamp oil was the only thing that would stay. She thinks about this with the seriousness of a six-year-old who has been awake too long, and decides it is a good enough reason.

When the water lifts the mooring hook and knocks it gently against the wall, you hold the lamp up so the blue letters catch the light. The two of you throw a single shadow onto the stone beside the words, a grown figure bent over a small one, and for a while neither of you says anything. Then Ada traces the blue letters with one finger, the way you taught her, and the tide keeps climbing without any hurry at all.