Black script lettering reading Give me strength when I'm standing and faith when I fall, tattooed along the ribs in a lettering style.

Script quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a black script quote across the side of a torso, set in three lines and reading "Give me strength when I'm standing and faith when I fall". The linework is smooth and even in solid black ink, with no shading or colour. An orange top is pulled up at the left, a hand rests on the upper side, and a plain wall and bedding sit in the background.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, you'll not hear the rest of it standing. My grandfather cut letters for the harbour wall at Skerrow, before the sea took the eastern end of it. He had a chisel he called Patience and a mallet that had been his father's, and in forty years he never put a word on stone that he had not first said aloud in his kitchen.

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The year the new mason came over from the mainland, the wall was cracking where the winter storms hit hardest. The parish wanted a line cut above the gate, something to make the men bring their boats in steady. The mason, a thin lad called Tobias Reeve, asked my grandfather what the line should say, and my grandfather said he would think on it. He thought on it for three weeks, through two gales and the burying of a boy who had gone out too early in the dark.

On the last evening he set down his tea and wrote it on the back of a tide table: Give me strength when I'm standing, and faith when I fall. Then he crossed out the apostrophe, because he said the sea had no use for contractions, and he put it back again, because Tobias said the men would read it wrong without it.

They cut it in three lines, so the wind off the water would not take the whole of it at once. The wall held through that first winter, the boats came home, and the letters were still there, weathered grey, when I was a girl running barefoot along the top of it. I still read them every time I pass. I still hear him saying the stone was the easy part.