Black fine-line lettering reading Enough with a semicolon before it, tattooed on the side of a person's ribs.

Enough lettering on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the word Enough in black ink, with a semicolon at the start, on the side of the ribcage. The lettering is thin and even with a clean, slightly serifed letterform. The skin tone is neutral and the image is shot in soft, uneven light against a dark fabric edge.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Word Semicolon

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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 down by the stove, you, and mind the kettle. My grandfather kept the light at Scarrow Head, and he had a habit I never understood until the winter of the big sea. He kept a logbook in pencil, and every entry opened with a small mark, a dot with a tail drawn by the side of his thumb, and then the word.

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Ask him what it meant and he'd say it was the mark for a sentence that wasn't finished yet. The word he used most was "enough". Enough oil for the night. Enough rope on the rail. Enough cold in his hands to keep the pencil moving. He'd write it, add the little mark after, and then keep going, because the lamp still had to turn.

In the winter of the big sea, the Mary Ellen went onto the Teeth in a black squall, and three men were still shouting in the surf when the lamp failed at midnight. My grandfather climbed the tower in the dark with a tin of paraffin and a box of matches that were half wet. He wrote in the log that he had nothing left but that. Then he lit the wick anyway, and it caught.

The men came in on the next swell, hauled as much by that light as by the rope. In the morning the log said only the mark and the word, and under it, in a shakier hand, a line he never let anyone read. That page is pinned to the tower wall now. Go on, read it. I'll wait while you find your glasses.