Black script lettering reading a quote across the side of a person's ribs, with a red top at the top of the frame, in a lettering style.

Script quote tattoo on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of black script lettering tattooed across the side of the torso, with the words running in two lines. The text is partly cut off by the frame and the edges of the letters are crisp against the skin. The ink is black only, and the red fabric at the top of the image is clothing rather than part of the tattoo.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Skerra Point has been dark since Tuesday, and the boy from the mainland keeps asking why the council won't send a new bulb. You tell him the bulb is not the problem. The problem is that your father taught you to climb the iron ladder with one hand and keep the other free for the rail, and nobody taught the boy anything at all.

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Your mother used to say it over the stove, more to the kettle than to you: if you don't live for something, you'll die for nothing. She had written it on the back of a tide table and pinned it above the dresser, and when the Morag Ann went down off the Sound with your brother aboard, that card was still there, curling at the corners, greasy with forty winters of cooking smoke.

So on the first clear morning you climb the tower yourself. The lens is furred with gull lime and the mantle has cracked, and it takes until dusk to find a spare in the store under the stairs. You sit on the cold step with your hands black to the wrist and watch the sun slide behind Eilean Mòr. When the wick catches, the beam swings out across the water and finds the rocks, and somewhere past them a creel boat turns for home.

You do not go back down to the dresser. You do not need the card. The light is on, and you stay up there until the boy's torch appears at the foot of the tower, small and anxious, asking whether it's working yet.