Black script lettering of a poem verse tattooed across the ribs on a side of the torso, in a lettering style.

Poem verse in script across the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a multi-line verse in cursive script tattooed along the side of a torso, reading from the upper ribs down to the lower ribs. The lettering is rendered in black ink with bold strokes and fine hairline flourishes on the capitals, with small shading in the letterforms. The ink is the only colour, set against plain skin with the frame tightly cropped on the text.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Text Wood

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas had driven the salt cart over the pass for thirty winters, and the horse, a grey mare named Bell, knew the road better than he did. On the last night of the year the snow came sideways off the lake, and by the time they reached the stand of larches below Hollin Gap the lantern was guttering and the mare would not go on.

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She stopped at the edge of the trees and stood with her ears turned back toward the cart, as if waiting for an argument. Tomas climbed down into the drift. Beyond the larches the wood went dark and deep, and somewhere past it there was a farmhouse light he could not quite see. His daughter was waiting there with a pan of barley soup and a promise he had made her in October, that he would be home for the first night of the new year.

He stood a long while with the reins in his fist. Then he took the sack of salt from the cart, split it open, and poured a white line across the path, the way his grandmother had taught him to mark a road for travellers who had lost their way. "Go on," he said to Bell, and she went, following the line into the trees as though it were the road.

At dawn the snow had stopped. The line was gone under drift, but the larches on either side were bare of frost, and where the salt had lain the ground was black and clean. His daughter found him asleep against the cart wheel at the mouth of the gap, his coat white, the mare grazing quietly beside him. She never asked him why he had not come the last mile, and he never told her how close he had come to staying in the wood for good.