Black and grey script lettering tattoo reading a two-line quote across the side of the ribs, with a hand resting at the left edge of the frame.

Script quote along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a script lettering tattoo across the side of a torso, set over four lines of text that read "I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not". The linework is crisp and even, with the letters shaded in solid black ink. A lace top sits at the upper edge of the frame and a hand rests against the left side of the ribs.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Lettering Text

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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

Brother Anselm sets the quill in your hand the morning the abbot's letter arrives, and tells you the hand must be his. The Bishop has asked for a psalter copied in the abbey's own script, and the scribe who once wrote it so, Brother Osric, died at Lent with ink still on his thumb. You have a clean, slanting hand, practised on the cellar accounts. Osric's was rounder, looped at the ends like a gate swinging on its hinge. For three weeks you practise his loops until your wrist aches and the candles gutter down to stubs.

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On the Sunday before Easter the Bishop comes to see the work. He turns the leaves slowly, admires the initials, and says he has never seen the abbey write so beautifully. Everyone in the room is smiling at you, the way the brothers smile at a good harvest. You want to tell them that the loops are borrowed, that the hand is a dead man's, that the rest of you is plain and crooked. Instead you say nothing, and Anselm pats your shoulder and calls you his finest pupil.

That night you return alone to the scriptorium and, beneath the gilt, copy one line in your own small upright hand, the letters leaning the way your own wrist leans. Let the Bishop find it. Osric's loops were beautiful, but they were never his to keep, and by dawn you have decided that a plain hand you can call your own is worth more than any borrowed grace.