Red script reading Ride or Die beside black dotted stripes that fade out, tattooed on the top of a foot.

Ride or Die script with dotted stripes on a foot

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

A red script phrase reading Ride or Die sits on the top of a foot, with a block of black stripes beside it that break up into scattered dots at the edges. The script has smooth, even linework in red, while the black section uses bold strips and stipple dots to create a fading effect. A stencil or transfer sheet with the same design lies on the plastic-covered surface beside the foot, and the toenails are painted bright pink.

Lettering Dotwork Other Script Phrase Stripe Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 14 never ran on time once the quarry closed, but Maureen Dyke drove it anyway, up the moor road where the tarmac gave out into gravel and the gravel into ruts full of rainwater. Her sister Pat rode beside her with the ticket machine in her lap and a biro behind one ear, writing the day's fares on the back of an old feed sack.

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Every Friday the two of them painted the same words on the inside of the windscreen in white paint: RIDE OR DIE. Pat said it was a joke. Maureen never laughed. On the bad stretch below Hob Tor the road ran under the old railway embankment, and the sleet came sideways off the moor in long dark streaks that thinned to speckles by the time they reached the village.

The night the bridge at Scarth washed out, the bus stalled in the ford with eleven passengers aboard. Pat counted heads twice while Maureen waded ahead with a torch, calling out the stones under her boots. Nobody panicked. They passed the children forward through the emergency door one at a time, and nobody argued about who went first.

Pat retired the ticket machine the following spring and had the words inked above her wrist at a shop in Halifax, the script in red and the rain in black. When Maureen asked why she had not picked something sensible, Pat tapped the ticket roll in her bag. Sensible, she said, never got anyone home.