Black ink script tattoo of Corinthians 13:4-8 with a small cross above it, across a person's ribs.

Corinthians 13 verse and cross on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A long block of black script text from Corinthians 13:4-8 runs across the side of the ribs, with a small Christian cross above the heading line. The lettering is fine and even in black ink, with no shading, and the verse is set in a centred, tapering layout. The photograph shows skin with a teal garment and a white top at the edges, with no colour in the tattoo itself.

Lettering Ribs Cross Script Bible verse Handwritten text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ledger lies open on the chart table, and you hold its corner flat with your forearm because the lamp is swinging with the roll and the ink is still wet. Three columns, ruled with the brass rule you took from the purser at Gravesend. Left: the burnt crust. Middle: the back door left on the latch. Right: the way she said your mother's name as if it had been left out in the rain. You have been adding to it since the Lizard, neatly, the way the mate taught you to enter cargo, and by the Azores the right-hand column has run onto the back of the tide tables.

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Abel, the cook, comes up the companion with two mugs and a face like wet slate. He keeps a Bible wedged behind the flour sacks and asks if you know the one about love suffering long. You say you know it, the way you know the name of a street you drove down once. He reads it anyway, slowly, because the lamp is failing, and when he reaches keeps no record of wrongs he stops and looks at your open book as though he can read upside down.

You wait until his boots reach the galley. Then you turn to a clean page and find you cannot write the heading. Patient, kind, not proud, not rude. Each line is a column you have been ruling, only backwards, a list of what she would have to become for you to be right. The pencil stays above the paper until seven bells, and the sea comes in green against the glass.

In the morning you tear the ledger from its spine and feed the pages to the wake one at a time, watching them flatten and sink. On a fresh slip of the purser's paper you write her name and nothing else, and fold it small enough to fit in the pocket over your heart.