Dark serif capitals reading UNTIL THE VERY END tattooed in a staggered layout on the outer thigh, above a brown knee-high sock.

Staggered quote on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a thigh with the words UNTIL THE VERY END set in Roman-style serif capitals, arranged on three staggered lines that step down and left across the skin. The letterforms are solid and even, in dark ink that reads as black or greyish. The skin is pale and the upper thigh is partly covered by a maroon skirt and a dark knit cardigan, with a brown knee sock below and a white balcony railing blurred in the background.

Lettering Thigh Text Quote Word Serif lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Aske set the card by gaslight, working backwards from the composing stick in his left hand. The widow had asked for a Roman face, heavy and plain, the kind her husband had admired on the stones at Kensal Green. He sorted each letter from its box by feel, the nicks on the bodies telling him which was which in the dark.

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He stepped the words down the stick in three lines, UNTIL THE, then VERY, then END, each line sitting a little further left than the last so the whole thing would fall across the card like a man losing his footing on a stair. Ruth brought tea up at ten and found him holding the proof to the lamp, frowning at the spacing.

"She'll want more than that," Ruth said. "Something before it. A name, at least." He shook his head and tapped the galley. The widow had been firm. Her husband had written the same four words on the flyleaf of every book he ever gave her, and she would not have the printer improve on them. "Until the very end," Ruth read aloud, and set the cup down without drinking.

He inked the rollers, pulled the first sheet, and watched the impression come up clean except at the final letter. The D had a nick in its bowl, a mark from some forgotten fall in a distant shop, and he left it there. Ruth would say later that it was the only honest thing on the card, a small flaw the widow would know by sight.