Black fine line script quote tattooed along a person's left ribs, reading life is not measured by the number of breaths we take.

Script quote tattoo along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A block of black cursive script runs diagonally across the side of the ribcage, set over five lines with the words stepped and slightly offset. The thin, even linework is solid black with no shading, and the skin tone and bathroom background are neutral and softly lit. The composition is close and centred on the text, with the wearer's blue top at the upper edge of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Quote Script Handwriting Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the urn, love, it's the only warm thing in Mrs Oakes's house and she charges for it by the cup. Now, the Lusk boy. You'll have heard he counted. Every breath, morning and night, in a ledger he kept under his pillow, because his father had told him a man should know exactly how much of himself he had spent.

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He kept the tally right through the winter of the gale. Two hundred and six thousand, four hundred and eleven, he'd written on the last page of October, and not a breath missed. Then in March the fog came in off the Skerries so thick you couldn't see your own boots, and a bell started up from the end of the pier, and Gideon went down the cliff steps with a lantern because somebody had to.

He found the Tranter girl on the shingle with her ankle snapped and her yellow coat soaked black. Hauling her up the steps, he said after, the sum went clean out of his head. He didn't know how many breaths he'd taken since the bell. He only knew the fog tore open over the harbour and the lamps of Skelling came up gold one by one, and that his chest was burning, and that he had never once in his life been so glad to run short of air.

The ledger's still in the back of the parlour drawer, if you want to see it. Last page is blank. Mind you, I've never had the nerve to ask Gideon what number he'd have written.