Black script tattoo reading 'she believed she could so she did' in three lines across the ribs, partly visible above a white vest top.

Handwritten quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a black handwritten script tattoo in three lines of text, reading 'she believed she could so she did.' The linework is smooth and even, with the lettering set on a slight diagonal across the side of the torso. The ink is solid black on pale skin, and the image is framed close, with a white vest top and soft warm light around the tattoo.

Lettering Ribs Quote Handwritten text Script Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Holt wanted the north wall of Harrowgate keep down before the county surveyors came on Friday, so it was me with the lump hammer and the cold chisel, knocking out mortar that had been set by someone who did not expect to be dug up. Behind a loose stone at knee height I found a tin box no bigger than a bread loaf, its lid rusted shut, and inside it a folded sheet of squared paper gone the colour of weak tea.

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The hand was looped and sure, written in pencil and pressed hard enough to dent the page. It was a surveyor's ledger of sorts: bearings for the curtain wall, the height of the well, the number of cartloads of lime that came up from Alnwick in 1931. Then, at the bottom, on a line of its own: she believed she could so she did. Nothing else. No name, and no date beyond the year.

I thought about that for longer than I thought about the wall. Mr Holt would have called it sentiment and sent me back to the hammer. I kept the sheet in my shirt pocket and went on working, but I found myself copying the lines out on the back of a cigarette packet, slowly, getting the loops right, as if the sentence had been left for whoever came next to finish.

When the surveyors arrived on Friday the north wall was gone, and the bearings I had taken that morning were no use to anyone, because I had spent the hours getting the lime mix right instead. Nobody asked me about it. I took the tin home and cleaned the lid with vinegar until it opened, and I still keep the paper folded inside it, beside the hammer I bought the week I started on my own.