Black lettering tattoo of a long passage about passion running vertically down the side of a torso over the ribs.

Passion quote lettering down the side

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A long block of black gothic-style lettering runs vertically down the side of the torso, forming a quotation about passion. The letters have uneven, hand-drawn strokes with solid black ink and little shading. The ink is crisp and the text fills the full height of the frame, with the skin tone lightly visible between the lines.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lettering man at Porthkennick never thinned his black, not even in January when the paint went stiff in the tin. He told me that the morning the harbour master brought him a quotation folded small inside an oilskin pocket, and asked for it to be painted down the length of the lifeboat house wall, one line above the other, where the crew would read it while hauling the boat down the slip. I was fourteen and holding the size pot. I remember the words because I copied them out wrong three times and was cuffed for it.

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The sentence had come from a schoolmistress called Miss Ruan Vosper, whose brother Hedley had gone out on the Gull in the winter of the great blow and never come back. She had found his notebook with the lines in it and gave them to the harbour master, saying they were the only true thing her brother ever wrote. The lettering man did not cut the letters neat. He drew them with a broad nib, letting each stroke wobble and catch, so the words looked as if they were being pulled up out of the wood by something that did not want to let go.

In October the glass fell fast and the crew of the Gull's sister boat stood on the slip with their hands in their pockets. Jory Trelease, the youngest, had a wife at home and a good reason to stay, and the coxswain had already turned towards the cottages. Then Jory looked up at the wall, at the line about the thing that sleeps in all of us and stirs and opens its jaws, and I saw his shoulders come back. They launched at ten past nine. Four came home at dawn, and the black letters on the wall shone in the lamplight as if they had been painted that minute.