Fine line script tattoo reading 'still' and 'beautiful' on the side of the torso, shown in a close-up photograph.

Script words 'still' and 'beautiful' on the side

Fine line · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Two small handwritten words, 'still' and 'beautiful', are tattooed one above the other on the side of the body, following the soft folds of skin. The linework is thin and slightly uneven in a cursive script, with the ink appearing dark purple. The close, softly lit composition keeps the words centred and in sharp focus against blurred skin tones.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Word Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The logbook's margin had one entry left unwritten, and Edie Marr had been staring at it since the lamp was lit. Her father had kept the habit for thirty-one years: each night, after the weather and the oil count, one word squeezed into the right-hand edge in pencil. Most were small, 'still' or 'cold' or 'mended'. She had never asked what they were for.

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The relief boat was due at first light, and the new keeper, a young man from Peterhead who had never seen the rock in a gale, would read the book for the first time. Edie had argued with the harbour office for a week to stay on until the autumn. Now she sat at the table where her father had taken his tea, turning the pencil in her fingers, and opened the drawer where he kept his old penknife and a shoebox of paper.

Inside the box were the margins, torn out and pinned in order, dozens of them, each dated. The words ran down the pages like a path. Near the bottom she found the night of the big sea in 1961, when the Hanna went onto the Skerry and two men came off her. Beside that night he had written 'beautiful' in the same leaning hand, and under it, smaller, 'still'.

She understood then that he had never been writing about the sea. Edie pulled the book toward her and wrote beneath the last entry, slowly, pressing hard so the lead would show when the new keeper held it to the light: the date, the wind, the lamp lit at dusk. Then, in the margin, her own small word, and beneath it, because it was true, the other one.