Black script lettering tattoo reading an Irish phrase across the ribs, shown on skin with a shirt lifted to the side.

Irish script lettering on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script lettering tattoo running diagonally across the side of the torso, with the words set in a curved, flowing line that rises toward the top left. The letters are solid black with soft grey edges and decorative flourishes on the capitals and loops. The skin is pale and the frame is tightly cropped on the ribs, with a hand holding back a striped shirt at the top and right.

Lettering Ribs Lettering Script Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nuala Ryan came to the yard in March with a pencil card in her coat pocket and asked me to cut a phrase into the lintel over her mother's door. The card was soft from handling, the words written in a hand that leaned hard to the right, as if it were running for a train. Fada gan iarracht, it said, and under it, in smaller letters, Mam's. I told her a lintel that size would take a month of Sundays to get the loops right, and she said Mam had waited thirty years for Boston to write back and would not mind a few more weeks.

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I ground the curve first, a long rising sweep that climbs from the left jamb toward the keystone, because the old lettering master always said a line of script should look as if it had been let go of rather than placed. The capitals gave me trouble. The F wanted a loop the width of my palm, and twice I cut it too deep and had to start again on the other face of the stone. Nuala brought tea at eleven each morning and stood watching the chisel without speaking, the way people do when they are deciding whether to say something important.

On the last Friday she asked me to leave the final stroke open, a small gap after the h where the stone could take a name later. I asked whose name. She only shrugged and said there was always someone who would come up the road late. We set the lintel that afternoon with a bar and a great deal of swearing. When the rain came in off the Atlantic that night, the cut letters filled with water and held it, so from the lane the phrase looked wet and unfinished, as though somebody had only just stopped writing it.