Black script lettering reading All was well with a small lightning bolt mark, on the side of the ribs, in a fine line lettering style.

All was well script on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words All was well in a flowing black script, followed by a thin lightning bolt shape at the end. The linework is fine and even, with solid black ink and no shading or grey tones. The text runs horizontally across the side of the torso, with white fabric visible at the top edge of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Script Lettering Lightning bolt

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bay lights dim to amber at half ten, and by midnight the only sounds on Ward 9 are the drip counter and Mrs Pryce snoring in bed four. I'm halfway through the medication round when I find Tilly Marsh awake, sitting cross-legged with a biro, drawing on the back of her hand. She's seven and has been in since Tuesday, and the drawing is a zigzag as sharp as a crack in ice.

Keep reading

"That's where it lives," she says, tapping the bolt. "The bad bit. Grandad says it's like a letter that got sent to the wrong house." I ask what the bad bit does. She shrugs. "It gets in the post." I take her obs and check the cannula while she watches me with the seriousness of a magistrate. Then she asks me to write something under the bolt so it knows it's finished. I write the words she dictates, slowly, in my worst handwriting: all was well. She checks the spelling against the poster above the sink, then nods.

Morning handover is loud and bright, with the day staff stamping snow off their shoes at the nurses' station. The consultant reads Tilly's notes twice and says the numbers are moving the right way, which is the sort of sentence nobody on nights gets to hear enough. I give the report on bay three in a flat voice, because that is the only way I can get through it.

At seven, when I go to say goodbye, Tilly is asleep with one fist curled against her chest. The biro has smudged across her knuckles into a grey blur, and the bolt has gone soft at its edges. I don't wipe it off. I tell the day sister the bolt is still there, just fainter, and she laughs and says that's the best thing anyone's said about a patient all week.