Close-up of a fine line black script tattoo reading "what's inside her never dies" on the upper chest near the collarbone, with a grey knit top beside it.

Script quote along the collarbone

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a line of thin black cursive script set in two lines, reading "what's inside her never dies". The lettering uses fine, even linework with no shading, sitting just below the collarbone. The skin is lightly freckled and the grey knit neckline frames the lower edge of the composition.

Fine line Lettering Chest Script Quote Text Lettering

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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

The gate at Hollin Tor has been chained since the winter the roof came down, and you have the only key that still turns. Mrs Achterberg's grandson sends you up the hill every Thursday with a flask and a clipboard, because the county wants someone to log the damage before the next storm. You count cracked lintels. You count jackdaws. Mostly you sit on the cold step of the great hall and listen to the wind through the arrow slits, as if it is looking for someone.

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On the third Thursday of October you find the loose stone. It sits low in the east wall of the solar, where the mortar has crumbled to sand, and behind it is a tin box no bigger than a bread loaf, its hinges furred with rust. Inside are letters tied with grey ribbon, all addressed in the same looping hand to a woman called Ellen Marr. The last one is unsealed. It is four lines long, and the ink has not faded much, which seems impossible for a letter dated 1743.

The writer is a man who has walled something into the castle: his daughter's silver, or his wife's letters, or his own shame, he does not say which. He writes that the thing will keep until someone is brave enough to look for it, and that nothing hidden in a house like this can truly die. You read it twice on the cold step, then a third time, and something in your chest tightens the way it does when a story seems to have been waiting for you in particular.

On the drive down you keep the letter in your coat pocket. The windscreen fogs with your breathing, and by the time the village lights appear you have already decided that the wall will be opened on Thursday, with or without the county's permission.