Small black script lettering reading cure on the side of the ribs, partly covered by a grey fabric top.

Cure script on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small tattoo of the word cure in black, flowing cursive script on the side of the torso. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is a dark blue-black. A grey fabric top is pulled up across the upper part of the frame, and the warm-toned skin fills most of the picture.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Word

Find an artist for this

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 you down by the range, because this is a tale about a single word, and in Cwm Glasfryn one word could be worth a week's wages. Mrs Bronwen Pugh kept the lamp room at the Deep Level, and above her bench hung a slate with nothing on it but chalk dust and the names of men who had gone down and not come back up. She read and wrote better than the overman, which is why the company let her keep the book.

Keep reading

The winter the damp got into the chests of half the row, Bronwen sat up nights with her remedies. Goose grease, mustard poultices, a foxglove tincture she'd have been locked up for in any city. None of it held. Then one night young Dai Morgan came in coughing so hard he couldn't stand, and she took the stub of pencil from behind her ear and wrote on the back of his shift ticket, in the looping hand her mother had taught her from the family Bible. One word. Cure.

His mam read it upside down and laughed at her. "You can't write a cure, Bronwen. That's a prayer." But by morning Dai was breathing, and the ticket went up on the slate, and every man who passed the lamp room touched that word on his way down for luck, until the chalk wore grey as a moth. The overman tried to rub it out once. He found his hand would not do it, and he never said why.

Mind, I'm not saying the word did the work. I'm saying the boys went down believing it, and a miner who believes carries half his own light. The slate is in the chapel vestry now. Somebody copied the word onto the plaster in ink, and the letters still lean forward, like they're walking ahead of you into the dark.