Black script lettering tattooed on the side of a ribcage, with a person in orange strappy lingerie lying down.

Script lettering on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop shows a person lying on their side in orange strappy lingerie, with black script lettering tattooed along the side of the ribcage. The script has bold strokes and fine shading, and the word is partly obscured by the strap and angle of the photo. The warm orange fabric and lighting dominate the frame, while the tattoo itself is in black and grey ink.

Lettering Ribs Script Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pell kept her ink in a horn pot on the windowsill of the Holm Fen ferry house, where the light came off the water and made every letter she wrote look wet. Tobias Crane came in one March morning with his cap in his hands and a chest of pale elm on the cart outside. He wanted a word on the lid for his wedding to Mary Dunning, and he wanted it in the old looping hand that the church clerks had stopped using.

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She told him no word worth that much ink would fit on a lid. He said he would pay in eels, and she laughed, and then she took up the quill. The word was FOREVER, and she wrote it slowly, the tail of each letter drawn out long so it looked as though it had been running all its life. When she reached the last letter the nib had nowhere left to go, so the stroke curled round the corner of the lid and down the side of the chest, where it stopped short of the hinge.

On the wedding morning the chest was carried to the chapel with its lid shut, and nobody read it. Mary's mother said it was a shame the best of the lettering was hidden on the side, and Ada said nothing, because the side was where the word had wanted to go.

Years later, when the chest was opened for a christening gown, the lamplight slid along the curve of the elm and found the tail of that last stroke, still dark and sharp, the one line that had turned the corner to keep the rest in place.