Black lettering tattoo on the side of the ribs reading We bury the ones we love and burn the rest, with the word burn in a heavy, flame-like style.

Quote lettering on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo on the side of the ribs shows the quote "We bury the ones we love and burn the rest" in black lettering across four lines. The word "burn" is set in a heavier, distorted blackletter with a flame-like outline, and "love" is in a larger, angular script with light shading. The surrounding skin shows pinkish redness, and the ink is black and grey against pale skin.

Lettering Ribs Quote Lettering Love Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Ardley sisters kept their rule pinned above the stove in Mae's careful capitals, and I read it every morning while the coffee went bitter: WE BURY THE ONES WE LOVE. Nobody had bothered to tell me the second half until the week my Ford's radiator cracked forty miles out on Coyote Flats, when Ruth Ardley walked me to the edge of the salt pan with a jerrycan and a shoebox of matches.

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The box was full of what people leave behind: a pocket Bible with its spine split, a dozen letters tied with garden string, a child's drawing of a horse that looked more like a dog. 'Everything somebody loved gets ground,' Ruth said, striking the first match against her boot. 'Everything else just gets in the way.' She lit a second and held it out to me, and I understood the box had been packed by someone who had already made up their mind about me.

I stayed to watch the paper curl. The letters went first, then the Bible, then the horse, which blackened and lifted off the page like a bird that had changed its mind. Halfway down the pile I saw my own handwriting on an envelope, the one I'd posted to Mae from Reno the year I ran off, and I realised she had been keeping me in that box all along, filed under the rest. My hand went for it before my head did.

I pulled it from the embers with my fingers and kept the one corner that was still whole. Ruth watched without a word, then nodded at the salt, white and endless under the sun. 'Then you're one of ours,' she said, 'and we'll find you a place to lie.' Behind us the fire settled, and the wind carried the last of the ash out over the flats, where nothing grows well enough to remember it.