Black ink script lettering in a cursive hand across the side of the ribs, reading a four-line romantic quote.

Black script quote along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a four-line quote in flowing cursive script, set across the side of the ribs on pale skin. The lettering is in black ink with bold, even strokes and some looping flourishes, and the lines are slightly curved to follow the body. The composition is centred and fills most of the frame, with a dark top covering the upper edge.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Cursive Text

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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

You almost miss the handwriting because the urn is hissing beside the trestle table and the squash has gone warm in its plastic jug. Forty-odd people from Year Eleven at Hollins Road Secondary are shuffling past the sausage rolls, and you are holding a paper napkin you have no intention of using. Someone has laid out a leaving-day yearbook for signing, open at the flyleaf, and there in blue biro is a line that loops the way Mrs Pargeter taught the whole form to write. It stops you where you stand.

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You remember her hand over yours at the back of the classroom, guiding the pen through the same loops while the radiator knocked. "Practise your joins," she said. "Words matter more when they run together." You had thought it a dull rule for a dull lesson. Now the ink has faded to grey, and the sentence sweeps the width of the page the way a mother's rhyme drifts up the stairs at bedtime, long after the light is off.

Across the hall, Gemma Lusk, who once bit a boy for taking her crisps, is laughing with a man in a suit until he turns and you see he is nobody you know. You carry the book over under your arm. "Who wrote this?" you ask her. Gemma squints at the page and shrugs. "Pargeter, obviously. She wrote in everything."

At the back of the book, on the last page, there is your own name in the same looping hand, and under it a line she promised she would copy out for you when you left, though you never came back for it. You fold the cover shut, take the yearbook home in your coat, and for the first time in years you practise your joins at the kitchen table until the words run together.