Black script lettering reading 'without struggle there is no progress' tattooed on a ribcage, shown in a lettering style.

Quote reading 'without struggle there is no progress'

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black script quote runs diagonally across the side of the torso, reading 'without struggle there is no progress' over four lines. The handwritten lettering uses fine, even linework with solid black ink and no shading. The tattoo sits on smooth skin against a dark fabric edge at the upper left, with the text filling the right-hand side of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carters of Scarrow Gap say the road over the pass was never given to anyone. Before the bridge at Ellan Water there was only a goat track and a long grey shoulder of rock, and the people in the low villages looked up at it the way you look at a debt. Nobody crossed it in winter. Nobody much wanted to try.

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Marra Tennick was the first to try it with a cart. She was thirty-one, her husband had drowned in the Ellan the spring before, and she had two mules and a grudge against the mountain. The old shepherd at the foot of the slope, a man called Eben Hask, watched her load the cart with slate and said nothing for an hour. Then he went into his hut and came out with a chisel gone blunt and a hammer with no handle. He pressed them into her hands. Without struggle, he said, there is no progress. Mind you don't mistake the struggle for the road.

She thought he was mocking her. She worked through the thaw and the summer after, prising stones from the scree and rolling them to the verge, cutting a line into the rock where the mules could find their footing. Some days she moved a single boulder a yard. Some days the cart slid back and took her skin with it. Hask came up once a month with bread and said nothing about the work.

Eleven years later the first wagon of wool rolled over Scarrow Gap in July. Marra walked beside the lead mule with one hand on the bridle and the other on a stone she had carried up herself. The mountain had not changed its mind. But the grooves her chisel had left in the rock were worn smooth now by iron rims, and when the drovers asked who had built the road, she told them a shepherd had handed her a blunt tool and a bit of sense.