Black lettering reading 'this war is mine' tattooed horizontally across the ribs, with a paper towel held above the skin.

Quote reading this war is mine on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a horizontal line of black lettering reading 'this war is mine' across the side of the ribs. The letterforms are a classic serif-style script with soft edges and even weight. The skin is warm-toned and lit evenly, with a blurred background of shelves and books, and a paper towel and a hand with dark nail polish at the top of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The type drawer had been robbed twice that month, so Odile Penhale kept her cases in order anyway, lowercase in one bin and capitals in another, because a printer who lost her order lost the island too. On the Tuesday the lieutenant from the mainland came off the ferry with a typed notice and a damp stain on his cuff, and asked her to set it for the morning.

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The notice said the island would surrender its fishing boats, its wireless set and its quarry men by the end of the month. Beneath it, in the lieutenant's own pencil, someone had added a line he wanted in the foot of the sheet: this war is yours now. Odile read it twice. She had set a thousand wedding banns and a hundred funeral notices, and she knew the difference between a sentence that wanted to be heard and one that only wanted to be obeyed.

She locked the forme, pulled one proof, and left the pencilled line out. In its place she set the words her father had chalked above the net loft door every winter of her childhood: this war is mine. Nobody asked her what it meant, and she did not explain. She inked the letters with the soft serif face he had bought from a Plymouth foundry, even and patient, and ran the sheet through the press until the lamp guttered.

At dawn the lieutenant read the proof, frowned at the foot of it, then looked at the old woman's steady hands. He folded it into his coat without a word and went back to the ferry. The notices reached every door on the island by noon, and by the end of the week the boats were still tied up in the harbour, their nets drying on the wall where the fishermen had hung them.