Black fine script tattoo reading 'We loved with a love that was more than love' across the ribs, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Script quote across the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A handwritten script quote runs across the ribs in two lines on the left panel and continues on the right panel. The thin black linework is clean and even, with a small outlined motif beside the words on the left. The skin tone is warm and the photos are cropped to the torso with no face visible.

Lettering Ribs Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Two hours before the ceremony at St Aidan's, Mrs Okafor's hem came unpicked again and I was on my knees in the vestry with a mouthful of pins. Thessaly sat on the stool with her shoes off, reading her vows from the back of a seed packet because she had lost the card. 'Read me the bit about the love,' she said. 'Not the whole poem. Just the bit that sounds like us.'

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I found the paper in my coat pocket, folded soft from a week of being carried about. Eleven lines in my own careful hand, with a small pencilled butterfly in the margin where I had tried to draw something to match the words. My grandfather was the only man I knew who read Poe aloud without clearing his throat first. 'We loved with a love that was more than love,' I read, and she laughed at me for getting the stresses wrong.

The church filled slowly, the way churches do when the rain has only just stopped. Her father could not trust his voice, so the groom's grandfather took the reading, got as far as the line about the sea, and stopped with his mouth open. The silence went on long enough for a child to cough. I didn't decide to speak. I said the next line from the third pew, quietly, in the rhythm my grandfather used, and heard the whole room breathe out.

Afterwards, in the car park, Thessaly pressed the paper back into my hand. 'Keep it,' she said. 'You've still got a hem to finish.' The butterfly I had stitched beneath the lace was a blue thread the colour of the sea in the poem, invisible unless you lifted the skirt. Nobody saw it that day but me, and that felt right.