Close-up of a tattoo on skin showing a purple awareness ribbon beside black script reading With pain comes Strength.

Purple awareness ribbon with script quote

Lettering · Mixed · Photo

A purple awareness ribbon with a looped top and two trailing tails sits on the left of the image. To its right, black cursive script reads "With pain comes Strength" across two lines, with the words "comes" and "Strength" overlapping the ribbon's tails. The ribbon is shaded in purple with lighter highlights, and the lettering is solid black with clean, even linework.

Lettering Awareness ribbon Ribbon Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy at the dye-house on Mill Lane had run the vats for thirty years before the blue came out wrong. Ribbons that should have gone the colour of bruised plums came off the line grey at the edges, and she sat up with them in the lamplight, pulling skeins through her fingers as if the fault might be in the thread.

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Her grandson Tom, who swept the floors and was not trusted with the copper, watched from the doorway. "Leave it, Gran. Wool doesn't mind a bad day."

"Wool doesn't," she said. "Folk do." She dropped the skein into the violet bath and held it under with a wooden paddle until her knuckles blanched. "My mother used to say the dye takes best where the cloth has been pulled hardest. Pain comes first, then the colour sets."

He laughed at that, the way boys laugh at proverbs. By the following spring the ribbons came out a deep, even purple, the loops stiff and bright, and she tied one to the gate of the church hall where the women met for the Thursday sewing circle. Someone pinned the saying on a card beneath it in careful ink, and it hung there for years.

Tom took over the vats when his grandmother's hands stopped holding the paddle. On his first morning he rehung the card and found the ink had faded to brown. He wrote the words again in black, the letters leaning forward the way hers always had, and went back to the copper to wait for the cloth to darken.