Black script lettering reading Fall down seven times, Stand up eight across the side ribs of a woman wearing denim shorts and a black lace thong.

Quote tattoo on the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's torso in close view shows two lines of black script lettering on the side of the ribs, reading Fall down seven times and Stand up eight. The lettering uses thin, even linework with a flowing cursive hand and no shading. The ink is dark grey-black against warm, softly blurred skin tones, with a background of muted green and a light top at the upper edge.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Text

Find an artist for this

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

The cutter Hesper came up the slip at Scarrow with her name scraped off the transom, and Mrs Pardoe sent for me because nobody else in town would lay gold leaf on a boat that had been sunk twice. I was twenty-three and had only ever painted shop fascias and the odd pub sign, but I had steady hands and a habit of saying yes before I had thought it through.

Keep reading

The owner was Tobias Wren, a skipper with salt in his eyebrows and a voice like a winch. He wanted his name back on the stern, and beneath it a line his father had cut into the wheelhouse beam decades before: Fall down seven times, stand up eight. He would not have it printed. Printed letters look like a menu, he said, and he wanted it in a hand that had been tired and had got up anyway.

So I worked by lamplight on the slip, brush loaded with black enamel thinned to a thread, following the cursive he had sketched for me in pencil on the back of a fag packet. The capitals kept wanting to sprawl. Each time a wave slapped the hull the wet wood jolted my wrist, and I learned to breathe out before every stroke and keep the line even. Tobias sat on an upturned crate and said nothing until the seventh pass, when he leaned in and told me his father had gone over the side off the Dogger in a February gale and climbed back up the ladder on his eighth try.

Next morning the tide came over the slip and floated the Hesper free of her blocks. I watched from the harbour wall as she swung on her mooring, the new letters catching the sun, and the last word of the saying turned slowly toward the open water.