Close-up of a black fine script lettering tattoo of four lines of text on the left side ribs of a woman wearing a black bikini.

Script lettering quote on side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph is a cropped view of a torso wearing a black bikini, with the head and face out of frame. Four lines of black script lettering run diagonally across the side of the ribs, with fine, even linework and solid black ink. The image is in warm, muted tones with a soft background and a gold chain draped over the body.

Lettering Ribs Script Text Quote

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the kettle's still warm, and mind the cat on the second step, she thinks she owns the stairs. Now, you asked me about the copyist's letters, the ones Morag Tully kept in the tin under the sideboard. I'll tell it the way I heard it, slowly, because the sea doesn't hurry and neither should we.

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Four lines, that's what the schoolmaster in Kilbride had to write out for the ferry office, every word in a hand so fine you'd need a lens to find the joins. He'd been asked to put the quote on the new name board for the boat, the words his own father had cut into a stone at the north pier. He worked at night by a paraffin lamp, the ink as black as peat, and each line leaned a little further across the page than the one before, like wind leaning over the headland.

The trouble came on the fourth line. The ink ran dry at the crossing of a capital, and he had to choose between a blot and a borrowed drop from the ferryman's pen. He chose the borrowed drop. The ferryman never once asked where it went, and the boat sailed under those words for forty years, until the day the schoolmaster's grandson stood on the slipway and read them aloud, every line, the way you'd read a name over a grave.

So that's your story. The words were never the point. It was a stubborn little drop of somebody else's ink that carried them across.