Black fine line script tattoo reading so it goes on the side of a ribcage, with a slight redness of the surrounding skin.

Script phrase on the side of the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script tattoo reading "so it goes" on the side of the torso, positioned along the ribs. The thin, flowing linework has a few heavier strokes on the long initial letters, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The image is lit warmly and centred on the tattoo, with a plain skin background and a little fabric at the top edge.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ned Harrow worked the narrowboat Patience between Worcester and the coal wharves at Stourport, and he kept a tally stick under the tiller, with a notch for every lock he passed. Each notch was a day the river had let him through. When his wife Maud died in the hard winter, he could not decide what to cut, so he cut nothing for a week, and the stick sat there with its clean wood showing.

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Old Ansel Crewe, keeper at Holt Fleet, came down the towpath with a lantern and asked why the stick had gone quiet. Ned said there was nothing to count. Ansel nodded, the way he nodded at floods, frost and the price of coal, and said, "So it goes." Then he handed over a hook of smoked eel wrapped in the Worcester Journal and went back up the lock steps without waiting for thanks.

Spring came and the water rose brown over the meadows. The Patience grounded on the Hanley bend, and Ned spent a whole day heaving her off with a pole and swearing at the mud. Ansel came down to watch. Ned said he would sooner have the flood back than the quiet. Ansel said the river owed nobody a kindness twice, and nor did the dead. Ned laughed, and then he stopped laughing.

That evening he cut a notch, and then a second beside it, and he did not stop until the stick was full. He lashed it back under the tiller. When the lock gate sighed open the next morning, the water was rising at his feet and the stick knocked softly against the wood. "So it goes," Ned told the gulls, and the gulls, having heard it all before, let him by.