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

Stay and Strong wrist tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two wrists are shown side by side, each with a script tattoo of one word: Stay on the left and Strong on the right. The lettering uses bold black ink with flowing, looped strokes and soft shading, and a small red heart sits beside the word Strong. The hands rest palm up with long black nail polish, and the plain dark background keeps the focus on the tattoos.

Lettering Forearm Heart Script Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the cat, she has no use for stories but she likes the warm. On Inish Taraidh, where the ferry came twice a week when the weather allowed, there lived two brothers, Cormac and Donal Gillies, as alike as two gulls on a rock. Their mother, Nessa, kept the shop by the slipway, and every morning before the men went out she took each boy's hand and wrote on the inside of his wrist with a pen dipped in the blue ink from the chemist's bottle.

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One grey March the boat was rotten at the keel, and Cormac, who was the elder and thought himself the man of the house, meant to take it out after the mackerel anyway. Donal begged to go with him. Nessa caught Donal's wrist in the doorway and wrote one word across it in a slow looping hand, and the word was Stay. Then she turned to Cormac and wrote Strong across his own wrist, and because she was a woman who did not do things by halves, she added a small red heart beside it with the paint she kept for the lighthouse rail.

The boat came back at dusk with its mast snapped and Cormac at the tiller, gripping a rope that was not his to hold. Donal stood on the slip with the lamp and did not move until the hull touched the stones. The blue word had long since washed off Cormac's wrist, but the red heart was still there, and Nessa kept her hand on it all the way up the path. Donal kept his own word for the rest of his days, and I am told he never once went down to the boats without looking at it first.