Black script lettering in Turkish over pink and blue watercolour splashes on the side of a ribcage, with a teal strap visible above.

Script lettering over watercolour splashes on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black script phrase in Turkish runs horizontally across the side of the ribs, with the lettering in a flowing, handwritten style. Behind the text, soft pink and blue watercolour-style splashes with dripping edges add colour, and the lettering sits over them with clean, sharp outlines. The photograph is taken at a close angle, with a hand holding a teal strap at the top left of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Script Lettering Watercolour Splash Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came sideways across the Dereköy field the night before the fair was due to leave, and by morning the side of the wagon had gone the colour of weak tea. Ayşe stood in front of it with a bucket and a rag and found that the words her grandfather had painted there were still readable, only just. Benim hayatım, yolum, hayalim. My life, my road, my dream. The black letters had held. Everything around them had run.

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The men wanted it scrubbed and painted over in plain green, the way the other wagons were done. Her uncle said a wagon with a sentence on it was a wagon that would be stopped at every checkpoint and asked who it belonged to. Ayşe said nothing. She went inside and came back with the old tin of pigments, the pink ground from madder root, the blue from a bag of indigo her grandmother had bought in Bursa and never once opened.

She did not cover the letters. She wet the boards again and dabbed the colours around the words, pink where the evening sky had been, blue where the rain had come through, and let the wash drip down the planks the way the water had. When it dried, the words looked as if they had been written across a storm that had passed over them and gone on.

They left at dawn on the Eskişehir road with the sign turned to the sunrise. Nobody asked the wagon who it belonged to. Ayşe rode on the step with her boots in the mud, and each time the road bent she could see the words over the wheels, black and certain, the colour bleeding out around them like a road that was not finished yet.