Black serif lowercase alphabet tattoo running across the ribs of a bare torso, with a hand with a ring holding the skin beside it.

Lowercase alphabet tattoo across the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single line of lowercase letters from a to z runs horizontally across the side of the ribs, set in a bold serif typeface with some letters slightly larger than others. The ink is solid black with clean edges, and the skin tone is warm with soft natural light. A hand with a ring holds the skin at the right edge, and the frame is a close crop of the torso.

Lettering Ribs Alphabet Letter Hand Ring

Find an artist for this

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

The frost had got into the barn again, so I carried the type case into the kitchen and set it on the table beside the range, where the metal could warm enough to take ink. Dad never trusted anything printed in capitals. He said they shouted, and that a sale notice ought to speak quietly like everyone else in the parish. So the case held lowercase and nothing else, a long row of little wooden drawers, and the sorts in them were worn to the colour of weak tea.

Keep reading

The f and the g had come from a foundry in Sheffield that closed before I was born, and they stood a shade taller than the rest, so every line he set had a faint limp in it. He liked that. He said a true alphabet should not be too neat, the same way a dry-stone wall is not. I used to think the letters were ordered for our benefit, but the case had been ordered for his hands, with the e close to his thumb and the z lost at the far back where nobody reached.

This January the z had gone missing altogether. I searched the straw in the calf pen, the drawer of baling twine, the pockets of his coat still hung behind the door. When I finally found it, it was wedged under the press with a boiled sweet stuck to its face. I rinsed it at the sink, dried it on the range rail, and locked it in its drawer. Then I set the whole line from a to z for the first time since the funeral, inked the bed, and pulled one sheet. The last letter sat a fraction low, and I left it that way and pinned the sheet to the gate for the sale.