Black script lettering tattoo on the side ribs, with a two-line quote above Roman numerals in a serif font.

Script quote and Roman numerals on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo on the side of the ribcage shows two lines of cursive script reading "God broke our hearts to prove to us" and "He only takes the best", with the Roman numerals VII.XV.MMVIII in a serif capital font beneath. The linework is clean and fine, filled in with solid black ink and no visible shading, and the text sits diagonally across the lower left of the frame. Only the torso is visible, with a dark sports top covering the upper body and dark hair falling along the right edge.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Script Quote Roman numeral Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dougal had the lines painted on the wheelhouse door of the Mary Ellen the week after the funeral, in white gloss, the letters so neat you could have mistaken them for a shop sign. I was twenty-two and thought it a daft thing to do on a working boat. We were three days out from Grimsby with the wind backing north, and every morning the rails had a skin of ice that we went round with mallets like pensioners at a bowling green.

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The date beneath was the day his son had gone over the side off Cromer, though Dougal never once said so and I only worked it out from the newspaper cutting he kept tucked behind the barometer. He called the numerals his proper address, as if the boy still lived somewhere you could write to. On the third night the glass dropped fast and the sea came up grey and short, and Dougal stood at the wheel for nine hours without sitting.

Near dawn the radio crackled with a little coble off Spurn, her engine dead and two lads aboard who had no business being out. Dougal swung us round without a word. I asked him, when we had them fast and shivering in the galley, whether he still believed God broke hearts to prove anything. He looked at the two lads wrapped in blankets and said that God had never taken a thing from anyone, and that he'd been wrong to paint it on a door.

He went out with a scraper the next morning and took the words off in long grey strokes, and then he sat on the hatch with the numerals still showing faintly under the paint, the way a date stays on a headstone after the rain. I left them there. Nobody on that boat ever asked him to paint it over again.