Black fine-line script tattoo reading Pura Vida across the ribs, shown on a person's side below a black crop top.

Pura Vida script on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script tattoo reading Pura Vida, placed horizontally across the side of the ribs. The lettering uses thin, even linework with a slight slant and simple shading, and the ink is solid black against light skin. The framing crops the body at the torso with a dark top above and a blurred background to the right.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Script Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third card that autumn came wedged under the brass knocker, its corner swollen from rain, and I read it standing in the hall with my coat still dripping onto the mat. My brother Tom writes the way he always has, in a hurry, slanting his letters as if the page might tip him off. Pura vida, he had written across the middle, underlined twice, and beneath it, a fishing boat called the Esperanza, a harbour with no name, and a cook who had taught him to say it.

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I had to explain the words to Mr Hale at breakfast, because he asked, and because he asks about everything. Pure life, I said. It means take the day as it comes. He nodded the way retired cartographers nod at a coastline they have not visited, then reminded me the gutter over room four was still spilling onto the step. I told him the gutter would keep, which is what I tell everyone. Tom had never once been a man who kept anything, and I had never once been one who let go.

That evening I took the lamp up to room four and sat on the bed while Mr Hale slept, listening to the sea grind at the shingle below. The wind came in through the gap where the sash no longer closed, and it smelt of salt and of a country I had never seen. I found a pencil stub in my apron and wrote on the back of the gas bill, in letters that looked nothing like my brother's. Tom, the gutter is still broken. The sea is still too loud. Come home when the boat is done, and bring the cook if he will come.

I pinned the bill to the hall board for the morning post, under the card with its stamp of a bird I could not name, and went to bed with the window open.