Black and grey fine line script tattoo on the side of the ribs, reading a quote with a feather at the left edge.

Feather and quote lettering on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black script quote runs diagonally across the skin, reading "we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time", with a feather outline at the left end. The lettering uses even, medium-weight linework with no shading, and the ink is solid black on pale skin. A dark mole and a hand with dark painted nails sit at the top of the frame, and the photo is shot in black and white.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Feather Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The granary tally was eleven sacks short, and I had written the figure myself, in my own neat hand, the way the vizier's clerks liked it. Pabasa stood in the doorway with his hands folded inside his sleeves, not yet accusing me of anything, which was worse. Beyond him the river was low and the barges along the quay smelled of wet reed and fish.

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He had asked me once to keep the numbers kind. I did it for him, for his brother's debts and a wife who needed a physician, and I told myself the sacks would be made good at harvest. They were not. My mother used to say that a scribe's fault is written twice, once on the papyrus and once on the heart, and only one of them can be scraped clean with a wet cloth.

When Pabasa asked for my tablet I did not hide it. I laid it on the table and turned it so he could read the false column. He read slowly, lips moving, the way old men read. Then he took a fresh sheet, dipped his brush, and drew a feather at its head, a single slanting plume like the one the weighers keep for Ma'at, and beneath it he wrote nothing at all.

"Write the true count," he said, and pushed the sheet toward me. I wrote it first, every sack and every measure of barley. Then, below the figures, in letters small enough that only I would ever need to read them, I wrote the rest: that the guilt would stay with me, and should, and that it would sit beside my hand each time I reached for the reed.