Close view of black script lettering across the ribs and abdomen, with a traditional envelope tattoo and a larger coloured design on the thigh, on a person lying on a grey patterned blanket.

Script lettering on ribs with thigh tattoos

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A person lies on a grey patterned blanket in a white bandeau bikini top and white bikini bottoms, with the torso and thighs in frame and the face out of shot. Black cursive lettering in a flowing script runs diagonally across the ribs and side of the abdomen, with clean, bold strokes and soft grey shading. On the upper thigh sits a small coloured envelope design with a heart, and a larger multicoloured tattoo on the lower thigh, with the image in natural daylight.

Lettering Traditional Ribs Thigh Lettering Script Envelope Heart Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are forty miles past the last filling station when the van's wipers catch on the dust and the envelope on the passenger seat slides against the window. The postmark says Brighton, which means nothing out here, where the road is the colour of a digestive biscuit and the only sea is a rumour told in the motel bar. Mrs Okonedo at the Sandhollow post office handed it over without looking up and told you to get it to the Pruitt place before the heat softened the glue.

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The Pruitt place is a bungalow with a dead pepper tree and a dog that barks at the van as though it has personally offended him. Mr Pruitt is in the yard, wrestling a hose that drips more than it sprays. He doesn't reach for the envelope straight away. He turns it over, reads the return address twice, and asks whether you know what it says. You tell him you don't read the post. He laughs, not unkindly, and says that is the first honest thing anyone has said to him all week.

He tells you about a woman in Sussex who wrote to him every Friday for eleven years, in pencil, on paper thin enough to read the light through. She always signed off with the same line, love deep like the sea, and he never understood it, because he had seen the sea exactly once, from a train window, and found it disappointingly flat. He says it was the only thing she ever asked him to believe.

He opens the envelope with his thumb. Inside is a curl of seaweed pressed flat and gone the colour of tea, and a card with nothing written on it but a small drawn heart. He holds it up against the sun for a long moment. You drive back with the wipers off, and for once the road ahead looks like water.