Black script lettering tattoo on the lower back reading Where life begins and love never ends, with Family in larger script beneath.

Script quote tattoo reading Family

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Three lines of black script lettering sit across the skin, reading 'Where life begins', 'and love never ends' and a larger 'Family' at the lower right. The linework is smooth and solid black with no visible shading. The ink is set on a warm, lightly lit area of skin with the top and bottom of the frame letterboxed in black.

Lettering Back Script Quote Text Family Love

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The miller's wife came to the scriptorium on the feast of Saint Etheldreda with a shilling knotted in her apron and a request Brother Osric found he could not refuse. She wanted a line written on a strip of vellum, the kind the brothers used for marking psalms. Where life begins, she said, and then she stopped, because she had never learned to finish a sentence she had not heard whole.

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Osric asked her what came next. She told him the fen had taken her husband in the wet spring and left her two boys and a ferry rope that no longer reached the far bank. The boys, she said, were the beginning of it. The rest she had heard at a cousin's wedding and it had stuck to her like pitch. He wrote it out in his best hand, the long loops of the capitals wandering across the strip, and when he came to the last word he hesitated over the tail of the letter, then made it larger than the others.

The vellum was nailed above the ferry-house door in the village below the abbey. For forty winters the boatmen touched it going out, and the children who learned their letters there traced the big word at the bottom with wet fingers, though none of them could say why it was bigger than the rest.

When Osric died, the abbot found his inkpot full to the brim and, pressed flat beneath it, a shilling knotted in a scrap of apron linen. He was not sure whether it had been a payment or a joke, so he left it where it lay, and the ink dried around it.