Black fine line script lettering reading keep it close watch on this heart of mine, curving along the ribs.

Script quote curving along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single line of cursive script reads keep it close watch on this heart of mine, arcing across the side of the ribcage. The lettering is in thin, dark black ink with even, consistent strokes and some soft fading at the edges. The phrase sits centrally in the frame against plain skin, with a finger visible at the top right corner.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Script Quote Lettering Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that bench, love, the one with the iron legs, and mind the pigeon. You've heard the 7.40 from Carlisle is late again, and you'll hear it's later still before the night's out. Let me tell you about Ada Pryce, who ran the lamp room at Kirkby Junction when my father was a lad, and the letter she kept folded in her apron pocket for thirty-one years.

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It came in the spring of 1919, pencilled on the back of a ticket stub, from a fireman named Tom Hadley who had gone north to work the pits. He had written only a few lines. The last of them told her to keep it close, watch on this heart of mine, and she took that for a joke at first, because Tom never could spell and never could keep a line straight. Yet the letters on the stub were steady and pressed hard, as if the pen had been held by a man trying not to shake.

She read it every evening under the lamp. The trains came and went, the whistles carried over the wet fields, and she kept it close the way you keep a coin you mean to spend someday. Nobody in Kirkby knew what became of Tom Hadley. Some said the pit took him, some said he had only walked off into a different life. Ada never said which she believed.

In 1950 a porter found a tin box under the lamp room floorboards. Inside was the stub, creased soft as cloth, and beneath it a second ticket dated the day Tom had written, bought for the 4.15 to Carlisle. It had never been punched. Ada had kept the other half of that journey for thirty-one years, and that's the part I think about when the last train goes.