Close-up of two fine line black script tattoos reading still and beautiful on the side of a torso, with skin folds visible.

Still and beautiful script on the side of a torso

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two small handwritten words, still and beautiful, are tattooed one above the other on the side of a light-skinned torso. The linework is thin and uneven, in a loose cursive hand, with the ink appearing solid black. The soft, close framing and pale background keep the focus on the lettering and the skin folds around it.

Fine line Lettering Other Script Handwriting Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink in the pot at Calder Bay post office had gone thick that October, so Ivy Hollis thinned it with a drop of water and told Frank Tully to sit down while she found her good pen. He had come in out of the drizzle wanting two words written out by hand, not sent as a telegram, because telegrams were for bad news and he wasn't having that. Still, he said. Beautiful. He wanted them on the back of a postcard, addressed to the boatyard at Port Arrin, where his wife's brother was mending nets.

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Ivy wrote them slowly, the way her mother had taught her, the S looping back on itself like a fishing line paying out. Frank watched every stroke. He told her Edie had said those words to him the morning after their first row, when she'd caught him at the window staring at the harbour lights, and he had never managed to say them back. It had taken him eleven years to find the nerve, and now the card was going to a man who would read it aloud at the pub, which Frank considered fair enough.

A year later the same card came back across the counter, sodden at one corner and tucked inside a brown envelope. Ivy opened it without thinking, and found it was not Frank's hand on the back at all. It was Edie's, small and sloping, underlining the word beautiful twice. Frank had asked her to write the reply, she had written it in the wrong order, and now he wanted it set right in a proper hand. Ivy dipped the pen and wrote the words once more, and the bell over the door rang as the ink dried.