Close side view of skin with the words Still and Beautiful in thin dark script lettering, placed on the side of the torso.

Still and Beautiful script on the side

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of bare skin on the side of the torso, with the words Still and Beautiful written one above the other in thin, handwritten script. The linework is fine and dark, appearing as a single purplish-black ink. The soft, warm-toned composition focuses on the lettering against the curve of the body, with the rest of the frame softly blurred.

Lettering Fine line Other Script Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Mercy Ann had been tied at Fenny Lock since the thaw, and every morning old Tobias Crane walked the towpath to see whether the water had dropped enough to float her. It never had. He stood with his hands sunk in his coat and watched the brown river shoulder against the gates, while his daughter Nell carried out his tea in the chipped enamel mug he would let no one else touch.

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Painted on the tiller board, faded almost to nothing, were two words in a looping hand, one above the other: Still, and Beautiful. Nell had asked about them once. Her mother had written them the summer before she drowned at Brindle Cut, her father said, so that he would have something to read at every lock. He never explained the rest, and Nell had stopped asking.

That March she took a wire brush to the rail to repaint the name. Under the old varnish the lettering was sharper than the board around it, cut in a stroke she did not know. She held a lamp close and saw that the loops were squared off at their ends, the way her father squared his lock tallies. Her mother's hand had been round and quick. He had copied the words from her last letter, then painted them over and over until the copies were the only ones left.

Nell left the rail alone. When the flood fell at the end of April, the Mercy Ann lifted off the mud with a groan of timber, and Tobias stood on the bank with his cap in his hand while she drifted out past the gates, the two words turned back towards him.