Two photos of black script lettering tattoos on skin, one reading together forever, never apart and the other reading maybe in distance, but never in heart.

Two script quote tattoos on skin

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

The image is a two-panel collage. The top panel shows the words together forever, never apart in flowing black script, and the bottom panel shows maybe in distance, but never in heart in a similar script. Both lines use fine, even linework in solid black ink with no shading or colour, and the lettering is set in a long horizontal line across the skin.

Lettering Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mail boat is an hour late, and Nell is still arguing with the purser about her trunk, so you stand on the slipway with your hands in your coat and read the words again. She wrote them on the back of a tide table at her mother's kitchen table, in the looping hand she used for school reports: together forever, never apart. Underneath, in your writing, she made you add the other line, the one you said was too sad to keep. Maybe in distance, but never in heart.

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Tam Rennie does the lettering for half the boats in the harbour, and he works in the back of the net loft with a kettle that never goes cold and a tin of fine nibs. He tells you ink outlasts paper and salt outlasts ink, but he traces both lines onto greaseproof anyway, sets them side by side, and makes you say them aloud so he can hear where the breath falls. He says the second line has a better shape to it. You do not tell him that you chose it because it sounded like her.

When the boat finally noses round the point, Nell stands at the rail with the tide table folded small in her fist. You do not wave. You count the gulls lifting off the breakwater instead, nine, ten, eleven, and it occurs to you that the words were never a promise about the sea at all, only a way of saying the boat would come back. The engine note thins until it is gone. You walk home along the wall, saying the short line under your breath, and the wind takes the last word and leaves you the first part, which was always yours to keep.