Black and grey script lettering with swirling flourishes running vertically along the side of the ribs.

Script lettering with flourishes on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical word in stylised script lettering, finished with swirling flourishes at the top and bottom, runs along the side of the ribcage. The letters use dark outlines with grey shading that gives them depth, and the flourishes taper into fine lines. The photograph is taken close up, with a hand holding back a teal top and a blue waistband visible at the lower edge.

Lettering Ribs Script Lettering Flourish Swirl Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come sideways off the hills by eleven, the way Dessa had known it would, so she moved her board under the fish-stall awning and wiped the gouache from her fingers on a rag that had been a bedsheet once. The sign was for Pryce's van, parked at the end of Kirkgate with its back doors propped open on crates of smoked haddock. He wanted one word down the side panel, top to bottom, with a curl at each end like the scrollwork on a Victorian shop front.

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She had sketched it in pencil the night before, working the F so its loop swung out over the rest like a gate left open. The trick was the shading. Thin the black with a drop of turpentine, lay the first grey on the downstrokes, then go back with a darker wash so every letter sat a little proud of the metal. Pryce's nephew held a golden umbrella over her shoulder and kept asking whether it would wash off. She told him it wouldn't, not for a good few winters, and he looked at the wet panel as if she had promised him something she couldn't deliver.

By half past two the rain thinned to a grey drizzle and the last tail of the flourish at the bottom went on in one long stroke, the brush lifting off the metal like a swallow leaving a wire. Pryce walked around the van twice with his hands in his coat pockets. Then he stopped at the back doors, looked up at the curl she had finished at the top, and said nothing at all. Dessa packed her brushes into the tin and let the word dry in the cold air, already thinking about the next board waiting in her shed.