Black and grey feather quill with shaded plumes above the script words Who will tell the story of your life, tattooed on the side of the ribs.

Feather quill and script quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded feather with a quill nib curls diagonally across the skin, with soft grey gradients along the vanes and a few lighter highlights. Below it, the words "Who will tell the story of your life" are written in a flowing hand-lettered script with a looping tail under the final word. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the image is a close, straight-on photograph of the tattoo on the side of the torso.

Lettering Realism Ribs Feather Quill Script Quote

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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

The post van left Harrow Cross at six, and Edith Pell had her sack of letters tied to the saddle before the frost had lifted off the hedges. She was seventy-one and had carried the Dunmere round for thirty-four years, so nobody thought to ask whether she should still be doing it. What she carried in her head was the names: which farm had a dog that bit, which widow wanted her mail left in the porch, which lad at the Crane had gone to the war and never sent word back.

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On the Tuesday she found a packet nobody had posted. It was wrapped in oilcloth and tied with green string, addressed in careful capitals to nobody at all. Inside was a single grey feather, a steel nib bound to its quill, and a sheet of paper on which someone had written only the question across the top, in a looping hand that leaned forward as if in a hurry. Who will tell the story of your life.

She read it twice at the gatepost, then folded it back into the oilcloth. At the next house she knocked, and when the door opened she did not hand over the bills. She asked the old man inside what he remembered of his mother's kitchen, and he began to talk, and she sat on the step with her satchel open and wrote every word down until the light went.