Two people show matching black script tattoos on their ribs reading I love you to the moon and back, with a swirl and small heart.

Matching 'I love you to the moon and back' rib tattoos

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two people's ribs are shown side by side, each with the same black script tattoo reading 'I Love You to the moon...and back', finished with a looping swirl and a small heart. The lettering uses fine and medium strokes with simple solid fill and no shading or colour. The close crop centres both tattoos, with dark clothing lifted at the top of the frame and a red car blurred in the background.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Heart Swirl Moon Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the tide tables in Porthrennan before you learn long division, because the boats don't wait for sums. So when Maud says she loves you to the moon and back, you point out that the moon is a quarter of a million miles off and the bay only goes out as far as the Carrick bar. She rolls her eyes and borrows your pencil.

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Old Ada Pengelly keeps the chandlery on the quay and sells fine brushes by the penny. The two of you spend a wet Saturday in her back room with a pot of black ink and a sheet of brown paper, practising the loops until your wrists ache. Maud gets the capital L right first. You get the little heart at the end, which is the only bit Ada says is not quite straight.

Then the Gannet goes out for the autumn herring, and Maud goes with her, a deckhand at sixteen in a borrowed oilskin that hangs past her knees. You keep the tide book on the harbour wall. Every evening you write the height of the water and the phase of the moon, and every evening the sea climbs the slipway to the chalk mark you drew and sinks back again.

On the night the Gannet is due, the moon is full over Carrick and the water stands high against the wall. You stand at the top of the slip and read the sum aloud the way you were taught, to the moon and back, and wait for the lights to round the point.