Black lettering tattoo reading NEVER, give up, back down, lose faith in mixed block and script type across the side of the ribs.

Never give up lettering quote on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words NEVER in bold block capitals, with give up, back down and lose faith in flowing cursive beside it. The linework is clean and solid black with no shading or added colour. The text runs diagonally across pale skin, with the block word on the left and the script lines stepping down to the right.

Lettering Ribs Quote Word Script

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 ferryman's daughter had been told three times that the river would not take her, and she believed none of them. So when the flood barge came grinding down past Saltcombe Reach, she waded out to her waist with a rope knotted round her ribs and a boathook in both fists.

Keep reading

The barge had been a chapel once, before the drowning years, and its planking still carried paint. Across the bow, square and black, ran the word NEVER, each letter as tall as her forearm. Beneath it, where the wet had lifted the varnish, three lines of looping script hung down and to the right like washing that had lost its pegs: give up, back down, lose faith. Her grandmother had called them the soft words. They were what a person said at the end of a long winter, when the work was done and the bread was gone.

She hooked the bow and hauled. The current fought her, and for a while the barge swung like a gate on a broken hinge. She said the block word aloud, not because anyone was there to hear, but because her grandmother had told her that a thing spoken into moving water is carried further than a thing kept in the mouth. The soft words she did not say. She read them once, the way you read a debt you already mean to pay, and then she shouted NEVER at the river until her throat ran raw.

The barge grounded on the shingle at dusk, its painted lines running with silt. Nobody in Saltcombe ever asked her what she had carried ashore. They only saw that the three soft words had faded to a pale ghost, while the one word that stood square was still sharp enough to cut a finger on.