Black typewriter-style lettering reading "Nothing gold can stay" on a forearm seen underwater, with light patterns rippling across the skin.

Quote lettering on an underwater forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a forearm under water, with bright caustic light rippling across the skin. The text "Nothing gold can stay" is inked in black across the arm in a typewriter-style font, set on two lines with the words slightly angled. The background is dark teal water, and the image is mostly warm skin tones against that cool backdrop.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

Keep reading

You will think me mad, typing this at the kitchen table with the ribbon gone pale, but the ferry has stopped again and I have nothing to do but watch the river through the window. The water under the old bridge is so clear this week you can count the stones on the bed, and every afternoon the light comes off it in sheets and runs across the ceiling like something alive. The customs man on the far bank says the sun has never done that in March. I told him it was only the river being honest for once.

Yesterday a boy came over on foot with a rucksack and a cardboard tube under his arm. His papers were in order and his face looked like he had been running for a week. I stamped him through and he asked, quite politely, whether the river had a name on the other side. I said it had two, depending on which bank you were standing on. He laughed, and then he didn't, and he went off up the road with the tube clutched against his ribs.

I keep thinking of the willows by the slipway, how their leaves went all gold for three days last October and were simply brown mud by morning. Nothing gold stays, Dad used to say, and then he would go out and mend something anyway. I am going to mend this ribbon now, and then I am going to post this before the next boat.

Love, Mary

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