Black lettering tattoo of a four-line quote in a clean sans serif font, running diagonally across the side of the torso above the ribs.

Quote lettering along the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a block of text in a clean geometric sans serif typeface, set across four staggered lines that rise and fall diagonally over the skin. The ink is a dark, solid black with crisp, even edges and no shading. The close, slightly angled framing fills most of the image with the lettering, with soft warm skin tones and dark shadow at the edges.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Late in August the apples at Hollin Farm came down faster than the pickers could carry them, and old Edda Marl said it was the Bramleys wanting to be done with the year. Her son Piet, seventeen and too proud to believe anything his grandmother said, went out at dusk with a ladder over his shoulder and found a grey man sitting on the bottom rung.

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The man was thin as a rake handle and wore a coat the colour of wet ash. He had a long ledger open on his knee and was running one finger down the names. 'Marl,' he said, without looking up. 'Your line is short a few years, and yours is written in the margin already. I have come to look at the trees.' Piet told him the ladder was spoken for. The man laughed, a dry sound like pips rattling in a tin, and said everything in the orchard was spoken for, sooner or later.

Edda had told the same story every harvest. Death was a fair man who kept his word, and he could be beaten at only one thing, which was being refused at the right moment by someone who meant it. Piet did not ask nicely. He pulled the ledger from the man's hands, found the line in the margin, and read it aloud in the voice he used for shouting at the dog: 'Not today.' The grey man stood, shut the book on his finger, and walked off between the trees without a word. That night the windfalls stopped falling.

In the morning Edda found the ladder leaning against the gate and one green apple on its top rung, cold and unbruised, that nobody had picked. She turned it over in her hands for a long while, then bit into it, because that was the rule, and it tasted of rain and of her son's stubbornness, which in that orchard had always been the same thing.