Black and grey script tattoo reading Semper Fi with swirling flourishes and a black eagle, globe and anchor emblem on a forearm.

Semper Fi script and eagle emblem on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells out the words Semper Fi in ornate cursive script, with decorative flourishes extending along the arm. To the right sits a solid black eagle, globe and anchor emblem. The linework is bold with soft grey shading, and the ink is almost entirely black and grey, with faint reddish tones around some outlines.

Lettering Forearm Script Flourish Eagle Emblem Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lot of you, and stop pretending you remember Mr Pargeter's chemistry room. Forty years, and the tuck shop still owes me a tenner. Now, Dougie Vance. You all knew Dougie as the boy who couldn't spell his own name in the register, and I'll grant you that was true. Then the summer of our fifth year he went off to the recruiting office in Hull with a biro and a bad haircut, and nobody expected a letter.

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The letter came anyway, two years on, in a brown envelope with a bird, a ball and an anchor stamped on the corner. His mum read it out at the bus shelter. It said only that he was well, that the sea had been rough off somewhere called Okinawa, and that the words he kept writing in the margins were the ones the sergeant shouted at him every morning. Semper Fi. Always faithful. He said it sounded like a joke until the day it stopped being one.

Here is the part I was never meant to tell. Dougie came home with his forearm inked in great looping letters, grey and black with a little red in the outlines, and a black eagle sitting by the wrist like it had been posted there to keep watch. His mum wept over it at the Sunday roast. He told her it was so he'd never lose the words, and she said he had never lost anything in his life except his temper and his dinner money.

Last I heard, Dougie runs the bakery on Carr Lane and still can't spell 'necessary'. He says he doesn't need to. The ink does the talking.