Black cursive script tattoo on the side ribs of a bare midriff, with a hand holding a cream macrame fringed bag.

Cursive script tattoo on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a bare midriff with a black fine line cursive script tattoo running down the side of the ribs, partly beneath a pale crop top. A hand with red nail varnish holds a cream macrame shoulder bag with knotted diamond patterning and long fringing. The soft, warm-toned composition sets the black ink against pale peach and cream tones.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Script Cursive Tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, and mind the bag on the chair, for that's Nessa's knotting and she'll have my hide if the coal dust gets in it. Now. Ffion Price could not write her own name when she married Tomos from the top row of Cwm Ddu, and she knew it, and she felt the shame every time a letter came up the hill with his hand on the envelope. So she went to the chapel schoolroom after the shift whistle and learned the loops of copperplate from Mrs Gwen Hopkins, who had buttons on her cuffs and no patience at all.

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The letters from the coal face came in pencil, always leaning forward as if the words were hurrying home. Tomos wrote about the roof falls, the pony called Dai who would not go down the new drift, and a cough he swore was nothing. Ffion learned the slant of his capital T before she could read the sentences around it. She wrote back with a steady hand, and the mistakes she kept folded in a biscuit tin under the stairs, because a mistake was proof she had tried.

The winter the drift flooded, the post stopped for nine days. On the tenth a boy came breathless up the hill with an envelope dried over a range. Inside, in a hand that wobbled like wet rope, was one line: Dai went down again, so I did too. Ffion read it standing in the yard. She did not cry until the boy had gone. Then she sat on the step and knotted a bag from cream cord, a diamond of knots she had learned that week, fringed at the bottom so it would swing when she walked to the post.

Tomos came up the hill in March with coal still in his eyelashes and read the letter she had sent him. It said only: I can write now, so come home and let me read you the rest. He did, and he hung the cream bag on the back of the door for the rest of his days, its fringe swinging whenever anyone passed.