Black fine line bell curve above a quote in black lettering, tattooed on the side of a person's ribs.

Bell curve and quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black outline of a bell curve sits above a line of black lettering on the side of the ribs, with the words running horizontally across the skin. The linework is clean and even, with the lettering in a plain serif-style face and the curve drawn as a single unshaded stroke. The image is in natural light against a soft, blurred background, with the tattoo centred across the frame and the top edge of a grey garment visible.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Quote Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that bench, the one with the wet patch, and mind your coat. The 4.10 is running late again, so you've got the wait of your life ahead of you and I may as well earn my tea. Forty years I kept the timetable at Cold Ashby Junction, and every morning I pinned a sheet to the booking hall wall with the minutes each train lost. Nobody read it. Porters wheeled their barrows past it and the stationmaster called it my little wallpaper.

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One wet November a lass called Nell Harbottle came in off the milk train carrying her father's ledgers. She stopped at my sheet and ran a pencil finger down the numbers. 'Most of them are nearly on time,' she said, 'and a few are very late, and a few are very early, and the rest bunch in the middle like sheep round a gate.' I told her that was just the weather. She said it was a shape, and shapes have rules, and the rules were older than any railway.

She drew it for me on the back of a fare card: one soft hump, rising and falling, its ends flattening out to nothing. Her father had shown her, she said, that most of what happens in the world gathers around the ordinary, and the far edges are where the odd folk stand. I laughed at her. Then I went home and checked it against thirty years of my own tickets, and it held, every last one.

Nell got her post at the signal box in Leeds and never came back. The wallpaper stayed, though, and her hump is still pencilled in the corner, with a line beside it in her round hand that I read every morning: you have great truths within you, if only anyone would bother to look. Now there's your train. Mind the gap, and look up for once.