Fine line black script reading with pain comes strength runs vertically along the side of a torso, beside a hand with rings resting on a purple top.

Script quote along the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a fine line script tattoo reading "with pain comes strength", written vertically along the side of the torso. The linework is thin and even in solid black ink with no shading. A hand with several rings and pale pink nails rests on a purple knit top above the tattoo, and the composition is shot in soft natural light.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Quote Lettering Hand Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada,

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The kettle is on and the lamp is pulled close, so forgive the smudges. Your mother rang from the ward at Mill Lane. Your uncle Tom came off the scaffold at the Carrow Street job, and the bone in his leg sits wrong now, and he is cursing the surgeon in two languages. I told her what I told you the winter the beck flooded: the water takes what it likes and gives back the rest, and you only learn which is which by standing in it.

My own mother had a saying chalked above the scullery door, though she never wrote it anywhere else. With pain comes strength. As a girl I thought it was a cruel thing to put where you wash the potatoes. Then I was the one with my arms in the bucket at four in the morning, scrubbing sheets after the Hardy twins' fever broke, and I understood she meant it as a plain fact, the way you would say the tide is out.

When they pulled the scullery down in 1961, the builders found the chalk under four coats of cream paint. The foreman wanted to scrape it off. I asked him to leave it, and he did, so it is still there behind the new cupboard, if you run your fingers along the join.

Come home at Easter and I will show you. Bring the good scissors with the blue handles, because the hem of your blue coat needs taking up before you go back to London, and your uncle has asked for you to sit with him while his leg knits.

Your loving aunt, Margaret