Black fine line script reading na mo amituofo runs along the side of the ribs, below a black bra band.

Fine line script lettering on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A side view of a torso showing a small line of black script lettering reading na mo amituofo, placed horizontally along the ribs. The strokes are thin and even with smooth, cursive letterforms and no shading. The image is in black and grey, with the bra band and long dark hair framing the tattoo against a softly lit interior.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your great-aunt Mei never once told you what those words meant, did she? She'd sit at the mangle with her mala beads running through her fingers, one bead to one breath, and that little tune under her teeth. Na mo amituofo. Over and over, while the steam came off the pressing irons like weather off the river.

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The laundry on Narrow Street had forty-one machines before the war and eleven by the year the lease ran out. Mei kept the books in pencil because the ink froze in the back room. When the landlord, a Mr Prothero with a ledger of his own, came to say the building was going for flats, she didn't argue. She asked him for one week, and he gave it to her, because nobody had ever asked him for anything so small.

On the last night she sent the girls home and scrubbed the copper pot herself. Then she wrote the phrase on a card, folded it into the lining of a christening gown that had come in with a torn hem, and pinned the gown to the line by the window to dry. In the morning the card had gone and the gown was ironed flat, its hem sewn so neat you could not find where it had torn.

The gown went home with a baby in Bow that winter, and the baby grew up and had babies, and not one of them could tell you who had mended it. But I know. Whoever stitched that hem knew the old counting: you keep going, one bead at a time, until the light comes up through the window and you stop noticing that you were ever counting at all.