Close view of a black script lettering tattoo reading though every dark night there is a brighter day, placed along the side ribs and partly below a white lace top.

Script quote tattoo along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black script quote runs in two lines across the side of the torso, reading though every dark night on the upper line and there is a brighter day on the lower line. The lettering uses fine, joined strokes with solid black ink and little visible shading. The photo is a close, slightly angled shot with the lace edge of a white garment at the top and a plain pale background.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis wanted the words on her café window before the bank holiday, and she wanted them in a proper joined script, not the blocky capitals the printer on the high street could knock out for a few shillings. Winnie Calloway had been sign-writing in Margate since she was sixteen. She knew the quote the moment she read it on the back of a menu card: though every dark night, there is a brighter day. Mrs Hollis had torn it from a magazine and thought it would cheer the holidaymakers.

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Winnie measured the glass twice and chalked the lines with a carpenter's pencil. She ran the upper line first, the loops of the g and the y leaning into each other like washing pegged on one line, then stopped at the lower line because the space was wrong. The words wanted to sit lower than the chalk showed, and her brush kept wanting to climb. Mrs Hollis came out with a tray of tea, said it looked lovely, and Winnie saw her counting the letters on her fingers.

After closing she thinned the black with a drop of turpentine so the hairlines would hold against the sea wind, and worked by the light of a paraffin lamp while the gulls settled on the lamp post outside. She dropped the lower line a full finger's width and the whole thing sat easier on the glass. By the time she packed her brushes the ink had gone tacky and gleamed.

The next evening the bulbs came on inside the café and the words lit up from behind, black on the last grey of the sky. A girl in a school raincoat stopped on the pavement, read the upper line, then the lower, and mouthed them slowly, the way Winnie had done with her brush, before she walked on toward the pier.