Black lettering tattoo of a four-line quote in a serif typeface across the side of a ribcage, with a hand and ring visible above.

Quote tattoo along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A four-line quote in a serif typeface is tattooed in black ink along the side of the ribs. The letters are crisp and evenly weighted, with fine hairline serifs and no shading. The text is set slightly off-centre on smooth, pale skin, with a dark green fabric and a hand with a ring and red nail polish at the top of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Quote Lettering Wolf Snow Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found its way under the tarpaulin again by eleven, so I moved the Penguins and the Ladybird guides onto the crates and let the cardboard boxes take the drip. Nobody comes to a secondhand stall in Hexham on a wet Saturday unless they are lost or hiding from someone, and most of the people I get are both.

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The boy came at half past. He was nine or so, in a coat two sizes too big, and he had a paperback held open against his chest the way you'd hold a hymn book. "Does this mean the wolf dies?" he said, and turned it so I could read the page. It was an old anthology of poems, the spine gone soft as bread. Someone had underlined a verse in pencil, and the lines he meant were the ones about snow and white winds, the lone wolf dying so the pack could go on.

"It means somebody wanted to be brave about it," I said, which was not an answer, and he knew it.

I thought of my brother Tom the winter the foundry shut, when he went off alone to Carlisle for work nobody else would take and never came back to the village. We all said the pack survives, the way you say grace, and none of us believed it until spring, when the rest of us were still here, still stacking books in the rain.

The boy paid me sixty pence in coins that had been in a pocket all morning. He folded the book inside his coat and ran towards a woman under a black umbrella, and when she bent down he pressed his whole body into her side, like a cub finding warmth.