Black script lettering running along the side ribs of a person lying down in neon yellow underwear, with part of the phrase readable.

Script quote along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A person lies on their side on a carpeted floor, showing the side of their torso. A thin black script quote runs diagonally along the side of the ribs, with only part of the wording readable. The skin tone and fine black ink are shown in soft natural light against a blurred background, with a neon yellow garment in the foreground.

Lettering Ribs Script Quote Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had worked the Harrow crossing for nine winters when her brother came back from the coast with a coil of rope that was not hemp. He said the traders had bought it from the salt people, tarred and pale, and that it would take any weight the river could throw at it. She didn't believe him until the flood came down in the third week of March, carrying a whole oak tree, and the old cable snapped like thread.

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The ferry broke loose and swung out into the current with a cart, two goats and the miller's boy aboard. Ruth threw the new line from the stern. It went out over the brown water in a long hiss and bit into the far post. She wound the end twice around her forearm and leaned back. The rope stretched, sang, and held. Her sleeve soaked through where the coil had ground into her skin, but nothing else gave way, and by dusk the boy was asleep by the fire with a goat on each side of him.

Afterwards the miller asked her what she had named the rope. She said she hadn't named it. Her brother had cut a small hook into the first fathom with his knife, and when the miller pressed her she only shrugged and said, "It will never let me down again." She said it the way her mother used to say things over the bread, plainly, as if it were a fact about flour.

Every spring after that, Ruth walked down to the landing before the first crossing and ran her thumb along the wet tarred strands, feeling for the hook. The river still rose. The oak trees still came down. She never once looked at the water when she did it, only at the rope, and then she took the tiller and called the first passenger across.