Black cursive script tattoo along the ribs reading 'Never a failure, always a lesson', in a fine line lettering style.

Script quote on ribs: never a failure, always a lesson

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black cursive script tattoo running horizontally across the side of a torso, just below a black lace bra. The words read 'Never a failure, always a lesson', with thin, slightly uneven linework and solid black ink. The image is in black and grey with warm skin tones, and the text sits in the centre of the frame against soft shadow.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Quote Script Text

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

You are the third mason to lose a chisel down the well at Harrowgate, and Mr Pell says the stone will forgive you if you stop swearing at it. The keep is open to the rain now. Its roof went in the winter the old Lord died, and the seaward wall has been bleeding lime ever since. Pell hands you a tin of gall ink and a brush with three hairs left, and tells you to copy the words carved above the postern before the frost gets them.

Keep reading

You climb to the gatehouse with the lantern. The letters are cut shallow, the way a man cuts when his hands are shaking, and half the lichen has to be scraped away with a thumbnail. Never a failure, always a lesson. Someone meant it as a kindness, or as a dare, and you can't tell which from the spacing. The lines wander as if the mason had grown tired of being sure of himself, and you find yourself copying the wobble along with the words.

Pell comes up at dusk and reads over your shoulder. He says the first chisel you lost was the best he ever owned, and he has spent twenty years trying to forgive himself for the fall that cracked the lintel. He tells you to leave the ink to dry and go down to supper. You don't. You sit on the cold step with the brush in your hand, writing the sentence in the margin of your notebook over and over, until the letters look less like a warning and more like a plan.

By morning the frost has taken the carving on the north face, and the only copy left is yours, wet in the corner of a page, slightly crooked, leaning a little the way the old mason's did.