Side ribs tattoo with the words never grow up in black script, flying figure silhouettes, stars and a green island with a gold-edged shoreline.

Never grow up script and green island on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

Black script reads never grow up across the upper ribs, with bold black silhouettes of flying figures and a dotted trail with stars. Below, a green island with dark mountain shapes is shaded with blended greens and outlined in gold. The design wraps along the side of the torso with the black linework and green colour balanced across the piece.

Lettering Ribs Script Silhouette Flying figure Star Island Mountain

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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 summer I was eleven, my brother Tam stopped sleeping in his bed and took his blankets up onto the flat roof above the chandlery, because he said the stars were nearer there and the gulls didn't wake him. Mum called it a phase. Dad called it nonsense, then climbed up after him with a flask of stewed tea and sat with him until the fishing boats went out.

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Tam drew me a map on the back of an old tide table, in green pencil he'd nicked from the schoolroom. It showed an island with a ridge of spiky hills, a lagoon shaped like a boot, and a dotted line that ran from our harbour wall straight out over the water. He said the island moved with the weather and you could only find it if you didn't look down at your feet. Across the bottom, in joined-up capitals, he'd written NEVER GROW UP, then crossed out the last word and wrote UP again, smaller, as if he'd changed his mind about it being a shout.

He went to the mainland the autumn he turned nineteen, to work on a cargo line out of Holyhead. The postcards came every month, always a lighthouse on the front and always the same two lines on the back: wind's up, boots are wet. Then one spring a card came with no picture at all, just the tide table folded inside it, the green ink gone pale and the island still there. Tam had written beside the boot-shaped lagoon: found it, come and see. I was twenty-six and had a mortgage and a van with a sticking door, and I said I'd go at the weekend. I still keep that card in the kitchen drawer, and some evenings I take it out and look at the dotted line, wondering which of us is the one who grew up.