Black typewriter-style lettering of a quote on the ribs, set over red and brown brick-like shading in a lettering style tattoo.

Quote tattoo on the ribs with red brick shading

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black typewriter-style quote reads across five lines on the side of the ribs, with the words 'you never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have left'. Behind the text, blocks of red and brown shading suggest a brick wall, with soft grey tones giving depth. The photo is taken close up with a grey shirt pulled up above the tattoo and a tattoo studio wall visible in the background.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The back wall of the old carding mill had been bonded with mortar mixed too wet, and by four o'clock the rain had found every seam in it. Ray Dunning worked the eleventh course loose with a club hammer and a cold chisel, and a brick came away in his palm with a sheet of paper folded behind it, soft and grey at the corners.

Keep reading

It had been typed on a machine with a sticky e, the letters sitting a fraction proud of the line. The same sentence ran down the page five times, and each time the words were spaced a little further apart, as if the typist had been trying to make room for them. Underneath, in pencil, someone had written only: Keep going, Hilda.

Ray knew the name. Hilda Marsh had kept the mill ledgers until the firm moved to Leeds in 1958, and her niece still sold cloth from a stall under the canopy at the Saturday market, where the water ran off the awning in a steady curtain. He went there with the paper in his jacket, dripping on the trestle tables, and waited while a woman in a green headscarf finished folding a blanket for a customer.

She read it twice, then shook her head. "She typed with one finger, you know. Took her an hour to do a letter." She tucked the sheet back into his hand. "Put it back where you found it. That's where she wanted it."

That evening Ray set the brick back in the wall, and the rain went on falling on the mortar he had not yet pointed.