Black lettering tattoo reading 'The ones we love never truly leave us' in a handwritten script across the side ribs, above a pair of jeans and a teal lace waistband.

Quote tattoo along the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a two-line quote in a black, handwritten-style script that runs horizontally across the side of the torso. The strokes are solid and even, with no shading or colour, and the lettering sits slightly off level across the curve of the skin. Blue denim and a teal lace waistband frame the lower edge of the photo against a plain light background.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have stopped counting the steps up the tower, but your legs still know there are one hundred and twelve of them, and your hand still finds the brass rail where your father's grip wore the paint thin. The lamp was automated in March. The council sent a man in a van who shook your hand, looked at the clockwork in the lantern room and called it a museum piece. You nodded. You kept the key.

Keep reading

Every evening since, you climb anyway and wind the weights by hand, because the mechanism wants winding even if no one needs the light. Below, the Tilly Ann comes in past the reef with her running lights blinking. Her skipper, Dai Lloyd, who fished beside your father for twenty years, lifts a hand from the wheelhouse when the beam finds him. You lift yours back, though he cannot possibly see you against the glass.

On Thursday the logbook falls open at a page you have never read. Your father's capitals, pressed hard enough to dent the paper: wind south-west, tide making, oil topped up. Then at the foot, in the small slanting hand he saved for letters to your mother, a line he never explained. The ones we love never truly leave us. Beneath it, the date, and a small cross where he would have stood the watch.

You take the pen from its hook. Your hand is not steady as you write the time under his, 21:40, and then the word lit, because it is. Out past the reef the beam goes round, and somewhere a boat turns for home by it.