Black and grey script lettering reading Family and Friends runs down the side of a ribcage in a lettering style.

Family and Friends script on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the side of a torso in black and white, with the words Family and Friends written in flowing cursive script running diagonally down the ribs. The ampersand is a looped decorative form, and the letters have smooth, even black linework with soft shading. The plain, darker background keeps the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Ribs Family Friend Script Ampersand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps have found the windfalls by the time you climb down from the ladder, and Mrs Okonedo is already shouting from the press house that the paint on the bin lids will never dry in this heat. You have a brush loaded with black enamel and a pencil line you drew at dawn, and you are three letters into a word you have not yet decided to write.

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She wants every picker's bin marked so the crews stop arguing over whose apples are whose. Her list is pinned to the barn door, forty names, most of them crossed through in red. The last lid is blank, and she has told you to fill it with whatever you think a family looks like when it is picking in the rain.

You write it the way your uncle taught you on shopfronts in Ledbury, the long F leaning over the e like a bough over a gate. Family, then the ampersand, which takes longest: you make it a looped knot of two letters holding hands, and then Friends, dropping down the lid. When you step back, the line slopes towards the grass at an angle that looks, in the low light, less drawn than grown.

Mrs Okonedo reads it from the doorway and says nothing for a while. Then she takes the brush from you, letters one of the crossed-out names beneath it, and says that man has come back for the harvest after all. She hands you the next lid. The wasps settle on the wet paint, and you leave them there.