Black fine line script-style tattoo running diagonally across a person's side ribs, with an arm held across the chest.

Fine lines across the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of bare skin on the side of a torso, with wet skin and dark hair visible at the left edge. Several thin black lines of uneven length run diagonally across the ribs, resembling handwritten script or lettering. The tattoo is in black and grey, and the composition is cropped to the torso with a hand resting on the upper arm.

Fine line Ribs Line Script

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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

Sit closer, the wind up here steals the back half of every sentence and I've no breath to spare for shouting. You see that wall? The north face, where the ivy has given up? Those scratches in the lime were made by Tobiah Crane, who kept the beacon when the castle still had a roof. He cut one line for every boat that sailed out of Porthgwin and never came home. Always slanted, mind, because he said a straight line looks like a grave and a slant looks like weather.

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The village counted them the way you count sheep, and got to nine before the winter of the flood. Then came a spring when the lines stopped being lines. They ran across the stone in short bent strokes, uneven as a child's hand, and nobody could make sense of them until Maud Penrose, who had taught herself letters from the back of a seed packet, stood with her palm flat against the wall and tilted her head like a gull.

What she read was no count. It was a letter, written in the old hand the ferrymen used, every stroke leaning the same way so the spray would not blur it. It said he had not been lost. He had rowed out to the rocks where the drowned boats lay and prised off the names carved into their bows, one by one, and kept them, because a boat without a name is only wood. The last stroke ran down past the edge of the stone, as if the hand had kept going.

Maud went down at low water with a bucket of lime and a stick, and copied every slanted line onto the inside of her own door. That evening, when the tide came back over the rocks, the foam lay in long crooked strokes across the shingle, all leaning the same way, and carried itself out past the point toward whoever was still waiting to be called home.