Close photo of a fine line black script tattoo reading "If you can dream it, you can do it" on the side of the ribs, with a hand and ring visible above.

Black script quote on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a two-line handwritten script quote in black ink reading "If you can dream it, you can do it." The linework is thin and even, with the lettering sloping across the skin and the second line set lower and to the right. The image is a close, soft-focus shot against plain pale skin, with a pink-nailed hand and a jewelled ring at the top edge.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Quote Word Script

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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

Sit down on that step and mind the wet, Dez. The lift's been dead since Tuesday, so we climb, and I'll tell you about Ruth Ansell, who lived on the fourteenth floor of Crane House before the council knocked it down. She wrote the council's signs for a living, all those notices about bins and bonfire nights, and she said the hardest thing in the world was to make a line look as if it had only just occurred to you.

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Her husband Frank wanted a boat. Not a real one, mind, just a little hull he'd tinker with on the kitchen table, and he kept saying he'd sail it off Skegness one day. Every night he came in from the yard, sat on the arm of the settee and said, I can't, Ruth, not at my age. And every night she'd tap the table twice with her pencil and say, if you can dream it, Frank, you can do it. He hated that she was right about things like that.

Then the flats came down, and Frank went in the February before, and Ruth moved to a bungalow with no stairs at all. In a biscuit tin she found his drawing of the boat, the sail still blank, and under it he'd written nothing but a question mark. She took her pen and wrote the words he'd heard a hundred times, the first line sloping across the bottom of the page, the second set lower and further along, as if she was leaning in to say it quietly.

She sailed that boat off Skegness in the spring, with a sail she'd sewn from an old tablecloth, and it went out past the groyne and came back in on the tide, which she said was more than most of us manage. Right then, up you get. The ninth floor's just round the bend, and I've got a story for every landing.