Black fine line script lettering in two lines across a person's ribs, partly covered by a dark waistband.

Script quote along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close side view of a torso showing two lines of black cursive script tattooed along the ribs. The top of the lettering is partly hidden by a dark ruffled waistband, and the words are only partly legible. The ink is solid black with clean, thin strokes against pale skin, and dark hair and a light curtain frame the background.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Script Quote Handwriting Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You arrive at Hollin Walk in March, when the glasshouse panes are still furred with frost and the head gardener, Ada Pell, hands you a trowel without looking up from her ledger. Her handwriting slopes across the page like wind through barley. Every bed in the walled garden has a card in that same looping hand, and you learn to read them before you learn the names of the pears.

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The first weeks are all cold hands and wet boots. You thin carrots, you tie in the espaliered branches, you lose count of the slugs. Ada praises nothing except a clean cut. When you finally ask about the card nailed above the cold frames, she shrugs and says it is the only sentence she has ever been sure of: When life gives you a hundred frosts, show it a thousand seedlings. You think it sounds like something off a tea towel, and she tells you that is exactly why she keeps it.

May brings the hard frost. You both drag sacking over the beans until your fingers stop working, and at four in the morning Ada sits on an upturned bucket and says the rhubarb will sulk but survive. She does not mention her knees, or the cough that has kept her up all week. At dawn the glass is white and the seedlings beneath it are green and stubborn, every one of them.

That evening she hands you the ledger and a pencil. The last entry is yours now, written in your own hand beneath hers. You copy the sentence onto a fresh card and pin it above the cold frames, and the wind lifts one corner as if it means to check your spelling.