Black script lettering reading The Pain You Feel Today Is The Strength You'll Have Tomorrow, with a blue awareness ribbon, tattooed on a person's side ribs.

Script quote and blue ribbon on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of black script lettering across the skin of the side ribs, reading The Pain You Feel Today Is The Strength You'll Have Tomorrow. A small blue ribbon sits beneath the final line, and the linework is clean and fairly thin. The text is the main feature against a plain, softly lit background of skin.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Ribbon Awareness ribbon Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys had me hold the lamp while she mixed the black, and she told me not to look at the glass until the last stroke was down. We were on Quay Street after eleven, the shutter half down on Hughes Tackle, the rain coming sideways off the harbour and making the pavement shine like wet slate.

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The order was for Owen Pritchard, who ran the chandlery next door and wanted a line across his front window he could read from the bus stop. Not a prayer, he'd said, just something his father used to say when the nets came up empty. Dilys wrote it out on brown paper first, three lines, the words stepping down like a staircase. The Pain You Feel Today Is. The Strength You'll Have Tomorrow.

She painted from the inside, so every letter came out backwards on the glass, and I learned to read the shape of the words in reverse while she worked. When she reached the small blue ribbon in the corner, she stopped and wiped her brush on a rag. "Not that bit," she said. "Owen can paint his own ribbon. A ribbon's a thing you stand behind, not a thing you copy off a stranger's wall."

So we left the corner bare. At half past twelve she flipped the lamp off and we stood in the doorway, and from across the road the line read the right way round, the black letters dripping faintly in the streetlight. Dilys pulled her hood up and said the rain would have it dry by morning, and the words would still be there.