Black and grey photograph of a fine line script tattoo on a woman's ribs, partly covered by a white vest top.

Script quote tattoo on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph shows a woman's side ribs, with a handwritten script tattoo in black ink running diagonally across the skin. The thin, cursive lettering is set in several lines and is only partly legible in this crop, and a white vest top and a patterned scarf cover part of the torso. The soft natural lighting and shallow focus keep the tattoo as the main point of interest.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Script Handwriting Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are holding the hymnal upside down when the envelope drops out of it, yellowed at the corners, addressed in a hand you half recognise. The vicar has just finished the second reading and the bride's mother is already dabbing her eyes in the front pew, so you slide the paper back between the pages and tell yourself it can wait until the carriages are out front. Outside, the rain has eased to a fine drizzle over the lych gate.

Keep reading

It cannot wait. By the time the speeches start in the marquee behind the rectory you have read it twice under the trestle table, the ink gone brown, the lines slanting uphill as if the writer were running for a train. Your great aunt Maud wrote it in 1961 to a man called Ellis Penhallow, who had sailed for Newfoundland and never sent word back. Most of it is about the weather and the price of paraffin. The last line is about the sea wall at Porthcurno, and it is underlined three times.

Afterwards, when the bride has gone to change, you take the letter to the groom's aunt, who was born in the village and knows everyone's business. She holds it to the lamp and reads the last line aloud, slowly, the way the old women used to read out the banns. Ellis Penhallow was buried at St Just in 1959, she says, and the stone is still there. Maud walked up to the churchyard every Sunday for thirty years and never once said why.

You walk up the lane in your borrowed heels and find the stone, grey with lichen, and somebody has pressed a fresh posy of white heather into the moss at its foot. You do not take the letter back. You leave it wedged under a loose slab with the ink still legible, the lines still climbing uphill toward whatever she meant to say.