Close photo of a fine line black script tattoo reading Smile on the side of a woman's ribcage, with her arm raised.

Fine line Smile script on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black script tattoo of the word Smile sits on the side of the torso, below the armpit, with a mole nearby on the skin. The lettering is thin, even and slightly slanted, with a smooth continuous stroke. The photo is shot from behind on a soft grey background, with the subject's face out of frame and her hair falling over her shoulder.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Smile Script Word

Find an artist for this

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 order came down the tube from Habitat Nine with only one word on it, and the clerk had underlined it twice, as if the scribe might argue. Smile. Ottilie Vance read it three times at her bench in the lettering loft, the lamp humming over the glass, and then she laughed, because the sender was Halvard Ruiz, and in eleven years of supply runs Halvard had never asked for anything without a joke tucked underneath.

Keep reading

He had been the one who stayed behind when the seed vault cracked its seal. He walked the long corridor alone with a coil of cable and a dead man's torch, singing off-key so the children in the nursery pods would hear something cheerful through the bulkhead. The children remembered the song. The adults remembered that he had kept on singing after the air thinned, because he said the gauges listened better to tunes.

Ottilie chose a fine nib and the slanted hand the old schools had taught her, the stroke kept unbroken so the word could be cut as one continuous line into the memorial plate for the outer ring. Three days later a second note arrived, shorter than the first. Make the S bigger, it said. He always said the S was the only letter he'd ever got right.

She made the S bigger. When the plate went up on the hull, the word caught the light of the passing Earth for a few seconds each orbit, and anyone standing at the viewport could read it without being told what it meant.