Close-up of a fine line black script tattoo reading for thee I love I will sacrifice, running vertically along a person's left side ribs.

Script quote running down the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical line of black cursive script reads for thee I love I will sacrifice across the side of the ribcage, with the lettering flowing from the upper back down towards the hip. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the tattoo is set against pale skin with a dark waistband below. The photograph is taken from the side at a slight angle, with the text filling most of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Quote Text Cursive

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ashby had worked the lock gates at Hollin Weir since the spring her father's lungs gave out, and she knew every barge on the Calder by its wake. So when the Patience came up on the flood with no one at her tiller but a dog, she dropped the paddle and ran.

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The dog was called Sorrel and would not leave the stern. Below deck, Tom Brennan lay in his bunk with a fever and a letter he kept pressing against his chest. He had written it in pencil, in a hand that wandered down the margin, and the words climbed when the boat rolled. For thee I love, it said. I will sacrifice. Nell read it aloud twice before she understood it was not written to her at all, but to a woman in Halifax who had married a carter in the autumn.

They got him to the infirmary on the cart. The carter came down to the towpath the next morning with his cap in his hands and stood there a long while without speaking. Then he asked Nell whether the boy would live, and she said she did not know, and he nodded as though that was the honest answer he had expected.

Tom lived. He took the Patience back down to the Humber that autumn with Sorrel on the bow, and Nell kept the pencilled letter in the lock-house drawer, under the tide tables. Some mornings she read the last words again and thought they had been set down the wrong way round. Whoever sacrifices, she decided, ought to be the one who gets to keep the boat.