Black script lettering tattooed on the inner wrists of two hands, reading It's Only Forever and Not Long At All.

Script quote tattoos on both wrists

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two inner wrists are shown with black script lettering, one line on each: It's Only Forever on the left and Not Long At All on the right. The letters have fine, even linework with a slight shadowing, and the hands are held palm up against a dark background. The composition is close and centred on the two tattoos, with no colour ink visible.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your grandmother never once agreed to a hurry. She stood at the bottom of the allotment in her wellies, the quince tree between you, and said the thing she always said when the frost came early: that the cold would take what it liked and leave the rest for spring. You were nineteen and certain about everything, so you told her the pear would never fruit before you left for Glasgow, and she laughed the way she did when she was already winning.

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Then the summer came in a rush, the way it does in Yorkshire when you have stopped expecting it. The pear did fruit. Hard, green, a little bitter, and she made you carry the basket up the path with both arms like a baby. She sat on the upturned crate by the water butt, bit one anyway, grimaced, and said, 'Well, it's only forever, love.' You did not know whether she meant the tree, the fruit or the two of you.

Years later you stand at the same gate with a spade and a box of bulbs she labelled in her thin capitals. The shed still smells of creosote and paraffin. You dig where she told you to dig, a full fork deep, and the clay is cold and stubborn. On the back of an old seed packet, tucked under the twine, is her handwriting: not long at all. You laugh out loud at nobody, and a robin drops down to see what you have turned up.

You plant the bulbs and press the soil flat with both palms, the way she taught you. The wind moves the pear tree, and its branches sway over the gate as if waving you off, or waving you in.