Black script lettering reading Nothing lasts forever, Nothing stays the same, in a fine line lettering style across the upper back.

Script quote across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is two lines of cursive script in black ink, reading Nothing lasts forever on the first line and Nothing stays the same on the second. The linework is fine and even, with the flowing capitals N and the lowercase letters joined in a handwritten style. The text sits across the upper back on pale skin with a light strap visible at the left edge, and the image is in natural light with no colour ink.

Lettering Fine line Back Quote Script Text Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit by the stove and mind the cat, she has been sleeping on the logbook again. You'll want to know about the writing on the lamp room wall. My grandfather put it there in 1938, in copperplate, with a brush and the last of the Admiralty white. Nothing lasts forever, nothing stays the same. He said it to the wall every night when he trimmed the wick, as if the wall had argued with him.

Keep reading

The men from the board came the spring after, with a van and a crate stencilled fragile. They wanted the old clockwork out and the great lens lifted off its mercury bath for a museum in Edinburgh. My grandfather stood at the foot of the tower with his cap in his hands. He asked only that they leave the words. The foreman laughed and said a lighthouse was a lamp, not a diary, then shrugged and let the wall be.

Forty years on, I was the one up the ladder with a bucket, because the damp had got into the plaster and the letters were going grey at the edges. I thought, this is the day, let it go. But I stood there with the sponge dripping down my sleeve and read it aloud the way he always had. The first line was still sharp. The second had softened into the lime, and I could not tell whether I was reading the wall or my own memory of him saying it.

So I left it. The new light up there runs off a sensor now and hums at dusk, and the boats in the bay say it looks just the same from out at sea. It doesn't. Two rocks have gone under and the lens is in Edinburgh behind glass. Every night I still climb up, say the words to the wall, and the wall says nothing back, which my grandfather always said was the only honest answer going.