Black and white photo of the word breathe in small typewriter-style lettering tattooed on the ribs below a woman's breast.

Breathe lettering on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white close-up of a torso, with a woman lifting the hem of a grey tank top to show a small tattoo of the lowercase word breathe. The lettering is set in a typewriter-style serif with solid black ink, sitting horizontally across the lower ribcage. The shallow focus and soft directional light keep the attention on the text, with the navel and dark underwear waistband lower in the frame.

Lettering Ribs Breathe Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ribbon in the old black typewriter had dried to the colour of weak tea, so every letter came out grey and tired, and I had to press each key twice to make it mean anything. Snow had been falling on the lower field since Tuesday, and Dad's invoices for the feed merchant were still stacked under the teapot where he had left them in November. I was hunting for a spare ribbon in the dresser drawer when I found the sheet.

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It was folded in four, the paper gone soft as cloth. Someone had typed the same word down the page, one line under another, thirty or so times: breathe, breathe, breathe, each one a little lighter than the one above, as though the machine had run low on ink in a slow and deliberate way. Dad never wrote anything he did not need to. In the margin, in his square capitals, he had written NOT FOR THE BANK.

I remembered the February of the bad lambing, when he sat up with the ewes three nights running and came in at dawn grey with cold. I asked him how he kept going. He said he had just been telling himself to breathe, and at nineteen I thought it was a joke. The sheet was dated the week he went into hospital in Carlisle, the week the first ewes began to lamb without him.

I wound a new ribbon on, fitted it with fingers that smelled of diesel, and typed the word once at the top of a clean page. The black came up sharp and even. I sat listening to the clock and the snow ticking against the window, and then I breathed in the way he had shown me, all the way down to the ribs, and let it out slowly over the keys.