Black and grey lettering tattoo reading Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt across the side ribs, with a star tattoo partly visible below.

Quote lettering and star on the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a torso side showing a block lettering tattoo in a blackletter-style font, set in three centred lines of uppercase words. A partly cropped star outline sits at the bottom edge of the frame. The image is greyscale with soft lighting, and the framing is close, with the arm visible on the right.

Lettering Ribs Quote Lettering Text Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dai had the lamp room to himself after the six o'clock whistle, and he liked the quiet of it, the smell of paraffin and wet wool drying on the pegs. He wiped the brass on each lamp with the rag Mrs Probert sent up from the chapel jumble, and he counted them twice because the overman counted them once and trusted nobody.

Keep reading

The letters came in the post from his sister in Swansea, typed on a machine that dropped its e's. She wrote about the new ballroom on Oxford Street and asked whether he had been dancing yet. He hadn't. He pinned her letters inside the cupboard door beside the shift rota, and the tin-foil star she had cut for his birthday still hung from the nail above the sink.

On Thursday the cage stuck at the eleven-hundred level and four men sat in the dark for forty minutes while the engineers swore at the winding gear. Dai was one of them. Somebody started a hymn in the blackness, badly, and somebody else laughed, and when the light came back the men blinked up the shaft like swimmers coming up for air. Nobody was hurt. Afterwards, in the lamp room, Dai took a stub of carpenter's pencil and wrote on the back of the rota in capitals, pressing hard, the words the bass singer had bellowed as the cage lurched: that the dark had been cold and the hymn had been terrible and all of it, somehow, had been fine.

He underlined it twice and left the rota on the bench for the morning shift. The overman would find it, read it, and say nothing at all, which Dai decided was as good as a blessing.