Two people stand side by side showing script lettering tattoos on their ribs, one reading Every sinner has a past and the other Every saint has a past.

Matching quote tattoos on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two people stand side by side, each showing a script lettering tattoo on the side of the ribs. The left tattoo reads Every sinner has a past and the right reads Every saint has a past, with smooth black linework and no visible shading. The skin tones and the black and grey ink sit against a bright green wall, with the two quotes placed at a similar height to mirror each other.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Couple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at St Oswald's expected the speeches to turn into a confession. My aunt Brenda had run the flower rota for forty years and read the parish newsletter like scripture, so when Jo Pritchard, the maid of honour, climbed onto a chair by the trestle tables and tapped a fork against her glass, the whole marquee went quiet. Jo held up a crumpled order of service. "Every sinner has a past," she said, and nobody laughed, because she wasn't smiling.

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The past, it turned out, was a seaside parlour above a chip shop, with bleach and vinegar in the air, and two girls of nineteen arguing over whether a dare still counted once you had paid for it. The tattooist, a man called Gil with a cracked ring on his thumb, had offered them a battered book of sayings his wife kept beside the till. They chose their lines by reading them aloud until the words sounded like each other. Gil asked no questions. Neither girl told him anything, and for fifteen years neither of them had told anyone else either.

Brenda got up slowly from the top table. "You were never a sinner, Josephine," she said. "You were a nuisance." The bride laughed so hard she had to sit on the step of the marquee, the bride's father started clapping, and within a minute half the room was reaching for their phones to find old photographs.

Later, when the band struck up, Jo and Marnie stood side by side at the edge of the dance floor, not touching, each of them smoothing the front of her dress. Gil would have approved. Somebody had to keep the quotes straight, and it might as well be the two people who had chosen them.