Fine line black script tattoo reading soror mea amica mea across the side of the ribs, above a faint healed band of skin.

Fine line script phrase on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A thin, single-line black script reads soror mea amica mea across the side of the torso. The linework is even and delicate with little shading, and the letters flow into one another with looped ascenders. The plain skin and pale floral wallpaper behind give a soft, neutral composition.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Latin phrase Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the range, duck, and mind the coal that spits. You'll want to hear about the Hartley girls, because nobody else in Harkness Row tells it straight. Our Nell and Bet Ridley were no blood to each other. Nell's mam took Bet in when the fever carried her own off, and the two of them shared a bed under the eaves for nine winters, fighting over the blanket like cats.

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Their fathers both went down Harkness Pit at six each morning with the lamps. In the spring of 1911 the cage stuck at the pit-head and the shift was held below for most of a night. Bet walked up the hill in her clogs with a loaf wrapped in a cloth and stood at the lamp-room gate until a man told her to go home. Nell was already there, with a chalk stub from the school, writing on the whitewashed wall where the men hung their tallies. She wrote it in the good hand the nuns had taught her: soror mea, amica mea. My sister, my friend. Bet asked what it meant, and Nell said it meant she was not going home until the cage came up.

Both fathers came up at dawn, black to the eyes, with nothing worse than bruises between them. The words stayed on that wall through the strike and the war, and the lamp-room man would not let anyone rub them out. Bet married a Cornishman who sang badly, and Nell went into service in Durham, but every Christmas one of them sent the other a card with those same words written on the back in pencil, never signed.

I have one of the cards still. Pass it over, go on. Read the back, not the front. That is all the sentence you need, and all the story there is.