Black script lettering on a side ribcage reading a line about being stitched together, with coloured sewing motifs including a red thread spool, three buttons and a tomato pincushion.

Script quote on ribs with sewing motifs

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

Black script lettering runs down the side of the ribs in a flowing, wavy line, spelling out a short quote. Red, green and blue sewing motifs, a red thread spool, three buttons and a tomato pincushion, are shaded with soft tones and sit around the text. The lettering is crisp and even, and the coloured elements balance the black script across the frame.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Quote Script Spool Thread Button Sewing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pargeter kept her tomato pincushion on the sill of the back room above the Palais, where the bass from the ballroom came up through the floorboards like a second heartbeat. Every Saturday night I sat there with my mouth full of pins, taking in hems for girls who had outgrown their mothers' nerve. I was seventeen and sure I would never be asked to dance.

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On the first Saturday in October a girl called Irene came up the back stairs with a green taffeta frock split under one arm. A button was missing from the cuff, and a red one hung loose at the back. She said she had cut her own pattern from a magazine and got it wrong. 'Can you do owt?' she asked. I said I could do most things with a spool and a bit of patience. Mrs Pargeter laughed from the doorway and said the dress was fine and the stitches would hold if the girl stopped pulling at them.

I sewed the cuff with blue thread while the band played a waltz downstairs. Irene watched my fingers and said she was made of nothing but mistakes, her mother said so, and she had hoped to look like a picture on the way in. I told her what Mrs Pargeter had told me on my first night up those stairs: every seam is a little wrong somewhere, and the trick is the good intentions you put through the needle. She didn't believe me, so I made her hold the pins.

When she went down, the frock hung straight and the cuff was sound. I found a scrap of paper pushed into the tomato, pencilled in her round hand: Myself I am stitched together. I left it where it was. Later I heard the band strike up again and a man's laugh, and somebody calling her name the way you call someone you mean to keep.