Black script lettering reading "Without struggle, There is no progress" on the side of a ribcage, with a pink top held aside.

Script quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink script quote across the side of the ribs, set in two lines with the first line slightly higher. The lettering uses fine, even linework with smooth cursive strokes and no shading, and the ink is a dark blue-black. The subject's torso fills the frame, with a pink top pulled aside by a hand on the left and a towel shelf visible in the blurred background on the right.

Lettering Ribs Script Quote Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clay at the bottom of the allotment was the colour of wet brick, and it had never once given anything up without a fight. Your grandfather used to say so every spring, leaning on his fork with his cap pushed back, and you had taken it for grumbling. Now you were on your knees at the far bed with a trowel that kept bending, cutting the same stubborn root for the fourth time, while the runner beans he had sown in March stood pale and leggy in their paper cups on the kitchen windowsill, waiting for you to finish.

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The shed smelled of creosote and old twine. Pinned above the bench with a rusted drawing pin was the card he had kept for as long as you could remember, its capitals faded to the colour of weak tea: WITHOUT STRUGGLE, THERE IS NO PROGRESS, underlined twice. You had always assumed it came from a seed merchant, the sort of slogan printed on packets to sell hope by the pound. Only when you lifted the pin did you turn it over and find his handwriting on the back, a column of dates, what had come up, what had rotted, and the word clay circled so hard the biro had torn the card.

You dug the bed by hand that afternoon, breaking the clay into crumbs with the heel of your palm and working in the barrow of muck you had hauled up the lane in the rain. Your shoulders burned. A blackbird watched from the fence and did not seem impressed. By the time the light went orange over the water tower you had a row open, straight enough that he would have grunted approval, and the beans went in one by one, each pressed down with a thumb.

Afterwards you sat on the upturned bucket and took the biro from behind your ear. Under his last entry you wrote today's date and, after a while, the word that had never appeared in his column: started.