Black fine line script tattoo on the side of the ribs reading two lines of text, Live without the sunlight and Love without your heartbeat.

Script quote along the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of cursive script read Live without the sunlight and Love without your heartbeat, set across pale skin on the side of the torso. The linework is thin and even, with flowing loops on the capitals and the descenders of the y and g. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the lines run slightly diagonally from left to right.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Quote Text Heartbeat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thaw came late that year, and Maud Ferrier spent the first warm morning counting the lamps. Forty-one in the well-house, each one a jar of stored light drawn from the glass fields on the ridge, each one guttering a little lower than the last. Her husband Dai would go down the shaft at dusk to the iron seams, as he had every dusk since the clouds closed over Hollin Vale, and she would be the one who watched the rope.

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The old folk of the vale had a saying for this, cut above the door of every house: live without the sunlight, love without your heartbeat. Nobody agreed on what it meant. Dai's mother said it was a warning against the sun-sellers, who traded their hearts for a single bright afternoon. Maud's grandmother said it was simpler than that. The dark is only dark, she said, and a body can bear it, but the one who sleeps beside you is the only sun you need.

Dai did not come up that night. The rope went slack at the third bell, and Maud hauled it with her cousin's boys until her palms split. They found him in the first gallery with his lamp smashed and his chest under a fall of stone. Maud sat in the wet dark with her cheek against his coat and listened for the thing she had always heard through the wall when they lay together, and there was nothing.

She lit the last lamp and held it close, and the flame leaned toward her as if it had opinions. She pressed two fingers under his jaw and counted the way her grandmother had taught her, slowly, a hundred times over. On the hundredth, something knocked back faintly, slow and stubborn as a door in the wind. She did not reach for the lamp again. She lifted him in both arms and carried him up into the thin grey light, which was enough.