Close side view of a fine line script tattoo reading Breathe on the ribs, with the arm raised and a dark hair backdrop.

Breathe script on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black script word, Breathe, is written in thin, flowing linework across the side of the ribcage. The ink is a dark, uniform tone with a slightly heavier stroke on the capital B and the final e. The photograph has a warm, high-contrast grade, with the subject's arm raised and the rest of the frame falling into shadow.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Breathe Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has been falling since Tuesday, and by the third night the road over Hollin Pass is gone under it, so you are the one who climbs the back stairs with the lamp when the fire in number four starts smoking. Mrs Okonedo, who keeps the ledgers and her temper in equal measure, has sent you up with a pan of coals and a flat look that says nobody else would go.

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The room belongs to a surveyor called Abel Trent, who arrived with a leather case of maps and has done nothing since but cough. His flue is choked with ice. You kneel on the hearthstone, work the damper with the poker, and the smoke rolls back down into your face. Trent struggles up on his pillows and wheezes, "Open the window, lad, before we both go." You do. The cold comes in like a dog let off its chain, and for a moment the room is nothing but air.

Then you see the glass. Someone has breathed on it, or the frost has grown that way, and in the fog on the inside of the pane a single word is written in thin, looping script: Breathe. The B has been pressed heavier than the rest, and the final e sits crooked, as if the hand that wrote it was tired or in a hurry. Trent, following your gaze, says the girl who sang in the choir at Ravensgill used to write on that window every morning before she went down to breakfast.

You stand there with the lamp hot against your palm and realise you have been holding your breath since the road closed, since the telephone line went dead, since your sister stopped answering. You let it out. The word blurs and runs down the glass in beads, and in the clean patch that remains you lean close and write it again, slower, the way she did.