Black script lettering tattoo reading without struggle there is no progress, placed on the side of the ribs.

Quote lettering on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script tattoo on the side of a torso, with the words 'without struggle there is no progress' written across three lines in flowing, cursive lettering. The linework is fine and even, with the ink appearing solid black against the skin. The skin tone is warm and the image is cropped tightly around the tattoo, with a dark fabric top at the upper left.

Lettering Ribs Quote Word Script Text

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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

You have spent the whole winter copying the same forty lines of Hesiod for a grain merchant who pays by the column, and your fingers have learned the reed's stubbornness better than your mind has learned the verses. The lamp smokes over the bench. Philon leans across your shoulder, taps the sheet with a bone stylus where the ink has pooled into a black eye, and sighs through his nose.

Keep reading

"Again," he says. "You are pushing the reed, not letting it travel."

So you wet the sponge, lift the blot, and start the line again. The letters come out thin, then fat, then tangled like a net dropped on the quay. Philon says nothing more. He takes your practice sheet, pins it to the wall beside the door, and returns to his own work. The wall is already crowded with other sheets, yellowed and curling, each one marked with a tutor's corrections in faded red. Most of the early hands are shaky. One is nothing but splashes and fury.

Spring comes and the ledger is finished. Your forty lines are rolled, sealed and carried off on a donkey towards the harbour. The next morning you find yourself standing before the wall, looking at the blotted sheet from your first week. Beneath its wobbling letters, in the same red ink, Philon has drawn a single line that runs unbroken from one edge of the page to the other.

You take a new reed, dip it, and write the line through without lifting. It does not come out clean, but it goes all the way across, and you pin it up beside the rest.