Dark blue script lettering reading through every dark night, there is a brighter day, across the side of the ribs.

Script quote along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the side of a torso, showing the phrase through every dark night, there is a brighter day written in flowing cursive script. The lettering is set on a slight diagonal with the upper line running above the lower, and the linework is clean and even. The ink is a single dark blue, set against plain skin with a light fabric edge at the left and a hand holding fabric at the right.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The slate above the forecastle table had been hung there by someone who wanted the watch to read it before sleep, and by the third week out of Valparaíso you had stopped seeing the words at all. Then the Cape weather came down on the Lydia Frew like a fist, and for four nights you lay in your bunk listening to the timbers complain and the sea roar past a hand's breadth of oak. Nobody talked much. Old Haddow, who had rounded the Horn twice, sat with his back against the bulkhead and mouthed the same line each time the ship lurched, as though it were a prayer he'd been issued.

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On the fifth night you went up to trim the binnacle lamp and found him wedged beside the wheel, soaked to the skin, his knuckles white on the rail. "Read it to me," he said, and jerked his chin at the glass hung above the companion hatch. Someone had scratched words into the varnish with a nail. Through every dark night, there is a brighter day. The letters leaned and wandered, the spacing was wrong, and the r in brighter had been carved the wrong way round.

"Who wrote that?" you asked. "Me, boy. My first ship, forty years back. Didn't believe a word of it." He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough that bent him double, and you held the lamp steady over his head until it passed.

Dawn came grey, then pale gold across the swell. Haddow was asleep under a tarpaulin by then. You took a rag to the glass and wiped the salt off the scratches so the light could find them. You thought about correcting the r with your knife, then decided against it, and left it facing the wrong way, the way he had made it.