Black lettering tattoo in a handwritten script running diagonally across the ribs of a person with wet skin, one arm folded across the chest.

Handwritten script tattoo along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is several lines of cursive script in black ink, set diagonally across the side of the torso below the raised arm. The linework is fine and even, with the letterforms slightly varying in height and slant. The image is in warm, natural tones with no colour ink, and the wet skin and blurred sea background make up the rest of the composition.

Lettering Ribs Script Handwriting Quote Text Line

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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

Pell had copied out the captain's letters for eleven weeks, and by the Cape he could write in the captain's slant without thinking. The ink was cheap Dutch stuff that bled in the damp, so he kept the pen dry under his cap and the bottle wedged between two logbooks in the cabin trunk.

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Tonight the captain could not hold the pen. His hand had stiffened on the gangway at Madeira, and he sat hunched at the table with the lamp swinging, dictating to the sea more than to Pell. "Begin with the weather," he said. "She likes the weather. Then the gulls. Then nothing at all, if you can manage nothing."

So Pell wrote about the swell, which had come up long and grey from the south, and the bread gone green at the edges, and a porpoise that kept pace with the bow for an entire forenoon as if it had been sent for. He wrote the lines slanting right, one beneath another, each a little shorter than the last, because that was how the captain liked a letter to look when it was finished, like something walking away.

At the foot of the last page the captain pressed his thumb to the wet ink. "Leave it," he said. "She'll know the thumb." Pell sealed the envelope without a word. In eleven weeks the captain had never once spoken his wife's name, and the address he gave was only a street in Bristol with the number left blank.