Two fingers with matching black script lettering reading 'til death, a fine lettering style tattoo on the finger joints.

'til death lettering across two fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two adjoining fingers are shown with the phrase 'til death written in black cursive script across each one, with the words set in a flowing, slightly slanted hand. The linework is solid black with no shading, and the ink sits on a plain light background with a second hand partly visible at the left edge. The composition is close and centred on the lettering, which is the clear focus of the photo.

Lettering Hand Phrase Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink was cheap and the needle had been boiled in a tin over a paraffin stove at the hut below the Col de Sarrat. Tomas held his hand flat on the table and said the words aloud so the old man could spell them right. "'Til death," he said. "Not a day longer." I laughed and said I would take the next finger along, and we both sat still while the needle went in, our breath steaming in the cold.

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We roped together for eleven winters after that. We carried salt up to the shepherds and brought wool and bad news back down, and we never once argued about who led on the steep ground. When the cornice gave way above us in the big snow of the eighth year, it was Tomas who dug me out with his bare hands, his knuckles split and bleeding, and I remember thinking the blue letters on his fingers looked like something written on a wall in a language I half knew.

Last February he went up alone to fetch a strayed ewe, and the weather came down behind him like a shutter. I waited at the hut for three days with the stove lit and the rope coiled on the bench. On the fourth morning I saw a figure lift a hand at the top of the pass, and I counted the fingers out of habit, one, two, the old words still legible across them.

He came down slowly, roped to nothing, and sat beside me without speaking. I threaded the rope through my hands the way we always did, feeling for the knots, and I found that the joke we had made at nineteen had quietly become the only promise either of us had ever kept.