Black and grey script tattoo reading Ohana with three small swallow silhouettes, placed on the side of the ribs below a black bra strap.

Ohana script lettering with swallows on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black script word, Ohana, is tattooed on the side of the ribs, with three small bird silhouettes flying above and beside the letters. The lettering uses smooth, solid black linework with a slightly tapered stroke, and the birds are filled in solid black. The image is a black and white photograph taken close up, with a hand resting on a dark bra strap above the tattoo.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Ohana Script Lettering Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night sister on Ward Seven had a rule about visiting after midnight, and it was the only rule Albert Cole ever bent. At ten past two he pressed his call bell for the fourth time and asked me, very politely, whether the word on his chart was spelled right. It said Ohana beside next of kin, in my handwriting from the afternoon shift, and he wanted it checked under the light.

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He had learned it in 1958 on a dock at Pearl Harbor, from a stevedore who told him it meant family, and that family meant nobody gets left behind, not even the ones who had been a nuisance. Albert had been a nuisance for sixty years by his own account. He said the swallows that nested under the eaves of his mother's house in Penzance worked the same way. They flew south every autumn and came back to the same mud nest each spring, which he considered the only sensible thing a creature could do.

I told him visiting hours had ended. He said he knew that, and that his daughter Ruth had been on the M5 since nine and would be up the stairs by half past, and would I please leave the door open. I did. I went back to the drip on bed four and counted saline bags, and every time I looked up the corridor was empty and the lino shone under the strip lights.

At twenty to three the lift opened. Ruth came down the corridor with her coat buttoned wrong, and Albert lifted one hand off the blanket like a man waving from a ship. 'Told you,' he said. She didn't answer. She sat on the edge of the bed and held on, and I left them to it. On my way back past the window I saw three small birds perched on the wire of the car park lamp, not going anywhere at all.