Black script lettering of a poem verse across the side of a torso, placed on the ribs.

Poem verse in script along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a multi-line verse tattooed in a flowing, cursive-style script along the side of the torso. The lettering is in black ink with clean, even linework and no shading, arranged in two blocks with a gap between them. The skin is pale with light redness around the ink, and the plain background keeps the focus on the text.

Lettering Ribs Script Text Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias Rudd had never been good with words, so he copied the verse from a broadsheet a travelling almanac seller had left on the chandler's bench, letter by careful letter, onto a slate cut from the old roofing of the net shed. He carried it along the breakwater at Scarrow Haven on the evening before the herring boats were due out, and found Nell Harrow where she always was, sitting on the lighthouse steps with her boots off and her feet in the cold water.

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He did not read it aloud. He held the slate out and she took it, tilting it to catch the last of the lamplight, and her lips moved over the lines. 'Where we can gaze into the stars,' she said, 'you've spelled stars wrong.' He told her the chalk had been unkind to him. She laughed, and that laugh was the first thing he ever kept.

The boats went out at dawn and the storm came in from the west before noon. The breakwater went under, the net shed went with it, and the Harrow light was dark for three nights while the town counted its losses. Tobias did not come back, and neither did the slate.

Forty years later a labourer digging the new harbour wall turned up a grey stone with a verse on it, the letters worn to ghosts. Beneath the last line, in a hand that had learned its letters in the same schoolroom, someone had scratched a line of their own: 'We were. Come and see.'