Black handwritten lettering reading Love all, Trust a few, Do wrong to none, tattooed on the side of a torso over the ribs, in a lettering style.

Quote tattoo along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows three lines of black handwritten script tattooed on the side of the torso, over the ribs, with the lines stepped and centred. The lettering has a thin, even, slightly uneven line weight and is set against warm skin tones, with a dark top at the upper edge of the frame. The background is a blurred indoor scene with a brown bag and a pink item, and the image is in solid black ink with no colour.

Lettering Ribs Quote Word Script Handwriting

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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 the bar to yourself when the snow seals the Hollin Gate window, so you are the one who sees the stranger stamp in out of the white with a clock case under one arm. He sets it down on the flagstones as if it might wake. "Room for the night, and the loan of a pen," he says, shaking drifts from his collar onto your clean floor. The register lies open on the counter, the ink already thickening in its pot, and you tell him the rule is coin before candles.

Keep reading

He pays with a brass key, not coin, and you let it pass because the pass is shut and the key is heavy with real metal. Then he takes the pen and writes three lines along the foot of the page in the looping hand of a schoolmaster: Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none. He blots them with his sleeve. "Clocks run slow in the cold," he says, "so somebody has to keep winding them."

In the morning the room is bare and tidy, the bed made square, and the case stands on the mantel ticking loud enough to hear from the stairs. The key lies beside it. Beneath his three lines, in the same hand, a fourth appears in fresh ink: Keep it wound.

You do. The pass opens in March, and the carrier's cart brings a wooden box addressed to you in that same looping hand. Inside is a brass key and a card that says only, Thank you for trusting the few. You copy the three lines onto the slate behind the bar, then, after a while, you lift the winding key from its hook.