Black script lettering tattoo reading Don't let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game, on the side of a torso below a grey top.

Script quote along the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of black cursive script run diagonally across the skin, reading "Don't let the fear of striking out" above "Keep you from playing the game". The linework is fine and even, with the letters shaded in a dark ink that appears slightly softened by the skin. The photo is a close, angled shot of the side of the torso, with a grey top and black underwear waistband at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Phrase

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your mum says you've stopped taking the ball down to the car park. She says you come in at six, eat your tea standing at the sink, and go straight to bed. So I'm writing this on the back of the gas bill, because you'll read a bill before you'll sit still for a lecture.

Keep reading

Forty-one flights up Hollis House, with the lift out since March, and I had a whole speech ready for a boy who'd been dropped from the Saturday side. Then I remembered Mr Okafor, who ran the chippy on the ground floor and kept a scrap of newspaper pinned by the till with a line from some old American slugger on it. He'd tap it with a greasy finger every time a kid came in moping. Don't let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game. He said it so often the words went soft at the corners, like a bus ticket in a pocket.

I know you think I'm going on. I know you'd rather I'd shouted, because shouting you could argue with. But I've watched you hold that ball like it might bite you, and I've watched you stop going out to the wall where we chalked the strike zone, the one the council painted over twice and we chalked back again. Nobody gets a hit by standing in the dugout with their gloves on.

Thursday, half five. Bring the ball. I'll be at the wall with my back to the flats, pretending I can't see you coming down the stairs, and I'll pitch the first one soft enough to hit.