Black lettering tattoo of a quote set in short lines running diagonally across the side of a bare back and ribs, with a blue-tinted photo.

Lettering quote along the side of the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a bare back and side, with a block of small black serif lettering running diagonally across the skin below the shoulder blade. The words are set in short, ragged lines, with a lighter line for the final word, and the ink looks solid and crisp against the skin. The background shows a pale bed and a curtain, and the photo has a purple-blue cast.

Lettering Ribs Text Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been taken off the copying work after the oxgall business, so the prior sent him down to the stonyard at Hollin Fell, where the masons let him letter the new almonry lintel as penance. The stone was wet from a week of drizzle. He snapped a chalk line with a cord, measured the short stepped lines by eye, and found that each one wanted to lean further right than the one above, as though the words were walking downhill toward the gate.

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Brother Tobias, the cellarer, stood under the scaffold with his hood up and read the text aloud as Anselm worked. "A little boy," he said, "loved very, very much, even more than they loved themselves." He sniffed. "Whose sentiment is that?" Anselm told him it had been written on the back of a bread ledger by a laundress who died in the infirmary the winter before, and that he had given his word to keep it where people would have to stop and read it.

The chisel skidded on the last word, so he cut it shallower and lighter than the rest. Tobias asked why it looked so faint, and Anselm said that rain would take that word first, and that a thing could be loved more than it was able to hold on to. Tobias did not answer. He went back up the hill with the wind pulling at his habit.

When the lintel was hoisted that spring, the boy who carried water for the masons stood beneath it and tried to make out the letters. Rain had already begun to fill the shallow cuts, and by evening the lowest word had gone grey, while the rest still stood dark against the wet stone.