Fine black script lettering reading If there is hope, it lies in the proles, set along the ribs beneath a breast, with a hand with black nails resting above it.

Script quote along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script quotation running in a gentle curve across the skin below the breast. The thin, even linework is set in a flowing cursive, and the ink is solid black with no colour. A hand with black-painted nails rests above, and small outlined heart and dot tattoos are visible on the fingers.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Lettering Heart Dot Hand Ring Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

Keep reading

The van is still parked behind the chapel on Mill Lane, and I have not had the heart to sell it. You will think me soft. Your grandfather would have told me to get on with it, but he is not here to tell me anything, so I sit in the cab with the flask and look at the lettering on its door, the gold gone brown, the curl of the capitals I painted in 1961 when every shop on Hallam Street wanted its name in a flowing hand.

Last week a boy came to the yard asking for a sign for his mother's bakery. He wanted it in a modern face, all square edges and no nonsense. I told him I could do square, but a good line bends the way a river does, and people read the curve before they read the letters. He did not understand. He was twenty and had a cartoon fish on his wrist. I wished him well and gave him the number of a man in Leeds who does vinyl.

Enclosed is the little brass stencil I used for the copperplate. Keep it. The piece I am proudest of is not a shop sign at all but a sentence I painted inside the cemetery gates, copied out of a book I had no business reading. The council made me paint over it in the spring, and I cried in the van like a fool. I kept a tracing of it, though. It is in the tin with the brushes, folded in four. Come and see it before they take the van away, and bring the kettle, because the tap in the yard still runs brown.

Love, Gran