Close photo of a black handwritten script tattoo reading fall in mutual weirdness and call it love, running diagonally across the side of the ribs.

Handwritten quote along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a handwritten phrase in black ink, reading fall in mutual weirdness and call it love, with the lines sloping upwards across the skin. The lettering uses thin, even linework with a casual, slightly uneven hand, and the ink appears dark and fairly crisp against the skin. The photo is taken close up at an angle, with fingertips visible at the top right corner and the text filling most of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Quote Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the sawdust's gone damp and the big top has more holes than canvas now. I'll tell you how the Ashgrove Brothers' Travelling Marvel came apart. It didn't fall so much as wander off in pieces, the way old things do.

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Their last strongman was Idris Vane, who could lift a pony but couldn't lift a telephone bill. The lady on the high wire, Marguerite, had a fear of heights that only showed up when she stood still. They fell in with each other the winter the generator died, sharing one paraffin lamp in the caravan. He read her crossword clues wrong on purpose so she'd correct him. She told him his jokes were older than the ring. He said, "Fall in mutual weirdness and call it love," which she said was the worst advice she'd ever been given, and she took it anyway. By February they were sleeping head to foot in the same bunk, and the clowns started a book on how long it would last.

The turn came when the council wanted the field for a car park. Idris proposed one last show for nobody, just the two of them, the wire strung between two lorries in the rain. Marguerite walked it blindfolded, which was the only way she could manage a step without looking down. Halfway across she laughed so hard she nearly came off, and he shouted that it was the strangest thing he'd ever seen. She shouted back that yes, it was, and that's what they'd call it.

The Marvel folded that spring. The lamp went to a pawn shop in Bristol, and the two of them still argue over whose idea the blindfold was. Mind the tent flap on your way out. That's the whole of it. They fell into something peculiar, and they called it love, same as anyone else.