Black and white photo of a fine line script tattoo reading be strong and courageous along the ribs, with the person's hair falling over the shoulder.

Script quote along the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a person's side and ribs, with a thin, cursive script tattoo that reads be strong and courageous running diagonally across the skin. The linework is delicate and even, in solid black ink with no shading. The loose top and hair cover the upper body, and the background includes a window, curtains and a checked fabric.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Quote Word Script

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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

Dear Ada, the abbot has moved me from the illuminating desk to the copying room since the frost took the lamp oil, so I write this with my left hand because my right has swollen around the pen like a knot in rope. Brother Anselm says the cold thins the ink. He is wrong about most things, but not about that.

Keep reading

I am copying the book of Joshua for the new lectern in the chapter house. Every line must be made in the same slanting hand, the running hand the old scribes favoured, so that no reader can tell where one man stopped and the next began. In the ninth verse I came to the words be strong and of a good courage, and I found I could not hurry them. The letters want to lean into one another like people leaning into wind.

Last night I counted the sheets I have finished this winter: four hundred and eleven. Not one of them is mine. Yet the boy who carries the vellum up the stairs stopped at my door and read the verse aloud, slowly, the way children sound out their letters, and then asked whether it was a rule or a wish. I told him it was for whoever needed it. He asked who needed it. I did not know how to answer without sounding like a sermon, so I gave him the sheet, still tacky, and let him carry it down without my reading further over his shoulder.

Write to me of the apple trees. Tell me whether the grafts took. Keep your own hand steady, and when you are tired, think of the ink drying on a page that will outlast us both.