Close-up of a black script tattoo reading Family with a small heart flourish on the side of the ribs.

Family script tattoo on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black script word, Family, with a small loop and heart flourish at the end, sits across the side of the ribs. The lettering is smooth, fairly fine and consistent in weight, with the ink looking dark blue-black against the skin. The photo is cropped to the torso in a warm, slightly soft light, with a grey cropped top and dark waistband at the edges of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Family Script Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate at the top of Harrow Lane had hung crooked for as long as anyone could remember, and Mother Aske would not let the carpenter straighten it. Its hinges sang when the wind came off the forest, she said, and a singing gate told the trees who was coming home. Above the latch, burned into the grey wood with a hot poker, was a single word in curling letters: Family. Her husband had cut it the spring their first boy was born, and at the end of the word he had made a small loop and a heart, because he could never leave a letter without a flourish.

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The boys went out one after another. Piet went to the salt towns with a cart and a borrowed mule. Anneke married a tanner from across the river and rarely wrote. Jan, the youngest, took the old bow down from the rafters one autumn and walked into the trees without saying where he was bound. Mother Aske lit a lamp in the window every night regardless, and she swept the step, and she left the gate on its crooked hinges so it would sing.

In the ninth winter the gate sang at dusk and a thin man stood on the path with snow in his beard and no bow at all. He did not speak. He sat down on the step, and the old woman sat beside him and did not ask him a single question. After a while she reached up and rested her thumb on the wood above the latch, tracing the letters the way she had done when he was small enough to be lifted onto the sill.

Jan looked at the carved word for a long time. Then he saw the heart at the end of it, worn soft by weather. He had forgotten it, he said. She told him she had not. In the morning he tied a strip of red wool to the latch, and the gate, which had never once been straightened, sang out across the frozen fields.