Two matching black script tattoos on the side ribs of two people lying on a bed, one wearing white lingerie and one in patterned shorts.

Matching script tattoos on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two people lie close together on a bed, photographed from behind and to the side, with their bare torsos partly visible. Each has the same vertical black lettering tattooed on the side of the ribcage, with crisp, solid lines and no visible shading. The image has a warm, indoor tone with white and cream fabrics and a mostly neutral palette, apart from the teal and black patterned shorts.

Lettering Ribs Script Lettering Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog came in off the Sound on the third night of the gale, thick as wet wool, and the lamp on Scarrow Rock began to dim before the tide had turned. Ida Rook climbed the iron stair with the paraffin can on her shoulder while her cousin Nell held the lantern below, calling up the count of the steps the way their grandmother had taught them when they were small enough to be carried.

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Scarrow had never had a keeper who was not a Rook, and the old men in Cullen Harbour said the light answered only to its own name. Every keeper's girl had that name inked down her side before she was let into the top room, the letters stacked one under another like the marks on a tide gauge, so that the light would know her when the weather would not.

At the top the glass was black with salt and the wick smoked. Ida trimmed it by feel, her fingers numb, and heard Nell's voice come up through the iron ring, thin and steady, counting rungs she could no longer see. The beam caught the fog and split it. Out past the reef a small boat turned its prow toward the white flash and kept turning until it came home.

Nell laughed when they came down at dawn with raw hands and grey faces, and said the light had done the work while they only kept it honest. Ida did not argue. She had learned that the name on the tower was not a boast but a rope, and that a Rook was only ever the hand that held it.