Two wrists with black script lettering reading Stay and Strong, with a small red heart beside the word Strong.

Stay and Strong script tattoos on wrists

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two wrists are held up side by side, each with a black script tattoo: Stay on the left and Strong on the right. The lettering has fine, flowing linework with swashes and a small red heart next to Strong. The background is dark, and the wearer has a floral sleeve and dark nail polish.

Lettering Forearm Heart Script Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every night shift on the Ashby ward, Sister Gwen Tallis carried a stub of blue chalk in her apron pocket, and she did not use it for the charts. When a man came in grey from the river fever, or a girl off the moor with an ankle bent the wrong way, Gwen would take the wrist in one hand and write a single word on the inside of it. The old porters said the words were already there in the building and she only copied them out, the way the tide leaves its lines on the sand. Mostly she wrote Stay. When the pulse was thin she wrote Strong, and beside it she drew a small red heart, because her mother had told her a heart was the only thing a word could sit comfortably next to.

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One February a boy called Tobin came in from the quarry with a cut that would not close. He was frightened of the dark between the beds and kept asking for the lamp to stay lit. Gwen wrote Stay on his left wrist. He laughed at her, then he stopped laughing. Near three in the morning the corridor lamp guttered, and she heard him repeating the word to himself, quietly, the way children count sheep.

By dawn the fever had broken. Tobin went home with his wrists clean, or so his mother believed, but Gwen had written in his palm too, small enough that he had to turn his hand over to read it. At Easter he came back to thank her and showed her the chalk had never come off. It had sunk into the skin the way ink sinks into paper, and it said Strong, with the heart beside it, exactly where she had left it.