Close-up of a fine line black script tattoo reading You'll be in my heart always, across the upper chest near the shoulder.

Script quote on upper chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black script tattoo reading "You'll be in my heart always" runs horizontally across the upper chest close to the shoulder and collarbone. The fine, even linework has a slight sheen and a few lighter areas where the ink sits in the skin. The plain background is a dark top, with the shoulder curving across the frame and a blurred window and vehicle behind.

Fine line Lettering Chest Quote Script Word Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass the rum along and hush, because this is the one about Tom Keeble and the bit of paper he never threw out. He was a stoker's boy from Deptford, and in the spring of 1887 he stood on the Greenwich pier with a bag on his shoulder while his mother pressed a folded card into his hand. She had copied the words off a memorial in the churchyard, letter by careful letter, because her eyes were going. You'll be in my heart always, it said, in a slanting hand that leaned like a drunk against a lamp post.

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Three months out, somewhere south of the Cape, the card went soft as cloth from sweat and salt, and the ink ran into grey smudges. Tom was ashamed to be crying over a scrap of paper with the watch looking on, so he went below to the ship's tattooist, a Maltese man called Carmelo who worked by the port light with a bottle of Indian ink and a needle wrapped in thread. Carmelo asked whether he wanted his mother's wobbly hand or a clean, printed face. Clean, said Tom. Paper goes, but a man's chest does not get washed off in the wardroom.

Tom came home in 1893 with the words still dark above his collarbone and his mother's card long gone to pulp in the bilge. She had died the winter before. The greengrocer's wife, Mrs Abbott, met him at the door and said the old woman had made her promise to have the same line cut on the stone. So there it was in the churchyard, cut by a mason who had never met either of them, reading exactly the same as the words on Tom's skin.

Mind you, Carmelo's needle was steadier than the mason's chisel, so I'll give the ink the win. Ink lasts longer than paper, and a stone gets rained on same as anything. That's my bit of sense for the night. Now, who's on the first watch?