Close-up of a black script lettering tattoo on skin, with two words joined by a large infinity loop.

Script lettering in an infinity loop

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two words in flowing script, joined by a large black infinity loop that sweeps across the design. The linework varies in weight, with thick strokes in the loop and finer strokes in the letter joins. The ink is solid black on pale skin, and the close framing fills the image with the design.

Lettering Script Infinity symbol Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bargeman wanted his name and his wife's on the stern, joined, because he had been told that was how a thing lasted. I told him paint doesn't care what it's told. I had been sign-writing for thirty years in a yard outside Stourport, and I knew the loop was the hard part. You cannot lift the brush from a loop without a join showing, and a join is where the weather gets in.

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So I went down to the mooring at first light with a mahl stick, a squirrel-hair liner and the gold size I'd been saving for something worth it. The names went on quick enough. Ruth first, in the upright hand my mother taught me, then Walter, leaning a little as if he'd had a drink. The sweep between them took the morning. I drew it in one breath, heavy at the bottom where the brush was loaded with black, thinning as it climbed, and the wet paint didn't run because I kept my wrist as still as a heron.

Walter came down the towpath with his cap in his hands and looked a long time. He asked why the line crossed itself where the two names met. I said that was where the loop closed, and that a loop needs somewhere to start.

He paid me in cash and didn't say thank you. The next spring I saw the boat moored at Tewkesbury with the paint still bright, and Ruth standing on the cabin roof, reading the letters aloud to nobody, as if they were a sentence she was still learning.