Close-up of a small fine line script tattoo reading 'it is what it is' in black ink along the side of the ribs, below dark clothing.

Script quote along the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black script tattoo reads 'it is what it is' in lowercase handwriting across the side of the torso. The linework is thin and even, with the letters set in a gently rising line. The skin is pale and the photo is taken at close range against a dark garment at the top of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrow House stopped between the fourth and fifth floors on the first Tuesday of every month, and Doreen Pask had started keeping a tally on the back of her gas bill. She counted the stops, the sighs of the doors, and the tenants who came up the concrete stairs with bags of shopping and their faces set like wet plaster. In the spring she wrote to the council four times. The fourth letter came back with a single line typed across the bottom: "it is what it is."

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She was still holding that letter when Kenneth Bale, the caretaker, knocked on her door with a torch in his teeth. He was seventy and had worked the lift cables since before the flats were painted. He told her the line had been his father's, a lift engineer who used to say it whenever a cable frayed and the job would not be done by Friday. "He meant it kindly," Kenneth said. "Meant you could stop shouting at the wall and start carrying the milk up."

So Doreen carried the milk up. She and the Okafor boys and old Mr Lund from flat twelve began a rota, each person taking the bags of someone who could not manage the climb. They chalked the words up the stairwell wall, one line per landing, the letters leaning a little more with each floor until the last ones seemed to be climbing the plaster on their own.

In October the lift worked one morning for no reason anyone could name. The doors slid open on an empty car. Doreen stood in front of it with a bag of potatoes in each hand and looked at the chalk on the wall beside her, the words rising towards the roof, and she took the stairs.