Black script lettering with decorative flourishes tattooed along the ribs, with a shirt pulled up beside it.

Script lettering along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of black script lettering with curling flourishes across the side of a torso, running diagonally from the ribs toward the waistline. The letters are filled in solid black with a blackletter-style, angular character, and the flourishes are fine, thin strokes. The image is in plain black and grey against pale skin, with a hand holding up a striped shirt at the edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nuala,

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The lift in Carrigmore has been out since Tuesday, so I have been taking the stairs like a woman half my age, and I can tell you the stairs have won every round. Eleven floors, with the shopping, and a rest on each landing where the paint is peeling off in curls like the bits of cornice your father used to say were trying to escape. Mrs Dolan from fourteen says the council will fix it when the fixing is finished, which is what she said about the bins.

I found Dad's old flat cap in the hall press this morning, under the Christmas wrapping. You'll remember the phrase he had for everything that took forever: the kettle, the post office queue, the bus on a wet Sunday. Fada gan iarracht, he'd say, long and no bother trying, and then he'd sit down anyway and wait for it. I used to think he was just being lazy. I'm not sure now that it wasn't a kind of patience he'd decided to call by another name.

So I've decided to stop being cross with the lift. On the seventh landing I counted the steps out loud the way you children used to, and by the top I was laughing at myself, puffing, with one hand on the rail and the grey light coming in through the window at the turn.

The lift came back on Friday. I took the stairs anyway, out of spite, and I'd like to think Dad would have approved.

Love, Mam

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