Black lettering tattoo reading we are who we are for a lot of reasons, in a simple sans serif font on the ribs.

Quote lettering along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a tattoo of two lines of lowercase text, reading "we are who we are for a lot of reasons", set in a simple sans serif typeface. The letters are solid black with clean, even edges and sit along the side of the ribs, with a dark garment at the top edge of the frame. The skin tone is light and the composition is a close side view with no other colour present.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Word

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you with the wet boots, and mind the lamp. Yes, those are the old letters, the plain ones the Ninth Archive pressed into everything after the long silence, when people had stopped trusting fancy hands. Two lines and no flourish. We are who we are, it says, and then the sentence seems to tire, so it carries on underneath. For a lot of reasons.

Keep reading

The salt-widow Orla Veit copied those words off a tide gate at Harrowmere the summer her brother went under the ice ships. She had no ink, so she used soot and a sharpened ferry hook, and she made every letter the same height because she wanted them to look as if they had always been there. People walked past it for a generation. Nobody could agree on the reasons. Some said debt, some said weather, some said the gods had been careless with the clay.

Then a girl called Pell, who sold eels by the sluice, asked the old keeper what the reasons were. He told her the truth: nobody had ever written them down, because the reasons were the thing you spent your life finding out. So Pell went home, took a stub of charcoal, and under the gate she added a third line, small, in a hand that wobbled. It was one word. Mother. She didn't explain it, and she didn't need to.

Now it's your turn, isn't it, with the wet boots. Here's the chalk. Don't write what you think the words mean. Write what they're made of. That night the tide came up over the gate and the chalk ran into the grooves, and by morning the three lines sat there half-washed, the reasons spilling down the iron and out into the sea.