Black script lettering reading Every saint has a past, Every sinner has a future, tattooed along the ribs in a lettering style.

Script quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of cursive script read Every saint has a past and Every sinner has a future, set one above the other across the side of the ribcage. The linework is clean and even, in solid black ink with no shading, and the letters follow the curve of the skin. The plain skin tone and soft, even lighting keep the focus on the lettering, with fingers with dark nail polish visible at the left edge.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script

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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

The painter came up from Ledbury the week the lime tree came down, and he paid for his bed above our forge in mutton and sharpened pencils. My father had hired him for the saint above the church door, Hilda with her book and her stag, but the man spent his first fortnight staring past the wall at the trees of Ashwood instead.

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Nobody in Holloway Edge spoke of Mab Carver, who had walked into those trees at sixteen with a bundle and a cloud of gossip behind her, and come out eleven years later with a daughter and no husband. The painter asked her to sit for Hilda's face. She laughed at him, then she sat. By Michaelmas the whole parish was whispering about it, so he took the board down, scraped the saint's halo clean, and wrote two lines beneath the window in his fine, leaning hand instead: Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.

My mother called it blasphemy. Mab read the words twice, then walked to the edge of the wood and laid her palm flat against the first oak, as though the tree had asked her name and she had finally given it.

I still have his brush. He showed me how to tilt every capital toward the light so the line carries even when the words are hard to say aloud, and I have tried to do the same with my own life ever since.