Black and grey tattoo of a ribbon bow, scrolls and the words Each day is a gift and not a given right, on the ribs.

Ribbon, scrolls and quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo on the side of the torso shows a shaded ribbon bow, ornamental scrolls and a small outlined heart beside the script words 'Each day is a gift and not a given right'. The bow and scrolls use soft grey shading for a raised look, while the lettering is crisp black linework. The design runs vertically over the ribs, with a black top above and a waistband below.

Lettering Ribs Ribbon Bow Scroll Heart Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has found the gap between your collar and your neck, and the stall ahead is already folding its tarpaulin into a sagging pool. You have forty minutes until the bus, a bag of bruised pears and no reason to be standing at the back of Thornley Market except that pitch twelve has not yet pulled down its shutter. Halina is still there, under a dripping awning, her spools arranged by colour on a slatted rack like a row of small grey moons.

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'Nobody buys grey in the wet,' she says, not looking up from her ledger. She is writing prices in a looping hand, and the figures blur where the drops land. You ask for a yard of the satin ribbon, the dull silver kind that the funeral directors order by the box. She measures it against her outstretched arm, cuts it with shears older than you are, and pushes it across the counter with a card tucked under the spool. The card is handwritten: Each day is a gift and not a given right. Her mother wrote it, she says, and pinned it above every cutting table the family ever owned.

You want to ask whether she believes it, or whether it is only a line for mugs and birthday cards. Instead you turn the card over and find a small pencilled heart in the corner, rubbed nearly away. Halina shrugs and says the rain will ease by four, and you know she is right about the rain and not about much else. You wind the ribbon twice around your wrist and tie it off with a knot you learned from a stranger on a ferry.

Outside, the gutter runs in a bright line off the awning. The bus is late, as it always is on wet Thursdays, and you stand at the kerb with the ribbon cool against your skin, watching the lights of the shops come on one by one, each of them open a little longer than the day before.