Black script lettering reading 'And though she be but little, She is fierce' tattooed on a person's ribs, with a dark top visible below.

Script quote tattoo on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a black script quote, arranged over three lines, tattooed on the side of a torso along the ribs. The lettering uses clean, dark strokes with a larger italic word 'fierce' at the end of the quote. The image is taken at an angle with warm tones, and a dark top and part of a wooden floor fill the background.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, because the wind off the Skerrin Rocks likes to get in between the words, and I don't want you missing the part about Ada Gull. You'll have heard she was a small woman. Everyone says so. She stood no higher than the lamp-room rail, and when the Board sent her to keep the light at Cairn Point after her husband drowned, the men at the harbour laughed into their pints and bet she'd be gone by Michaelmas.

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She wasn't gone by Michaelmas. She wasn't gone by the first winter either, when a storm out of the north-west tore the lower gallery door clean off its hinges. The relief boat couldn't land for nine days. Ada climbed the tower every dusk regardless, wound the clockwork by hand when the spring gave out, and trimmed the wick with a pair of scissors she'd carried since she was a girl in service. Her knuckles bled, she said, but the lamp never dimmed.

On the ninth night a fishing smack came round the Skerrin, lost, its lantern guttering out. The skipper saw the beam sweep over him, steady as a pulse, and steered for it. He told the inn afterwards that the light was no bigger than a candle flame from the water, and that was the whole of the miracle: a small thing that refused to be put out.

Ada outlived most of the men who laughed. When they cut her name above the door, the mason asked what words she wanted beneath it. She said she'd have the line Mr Tennant read aloud at the schoolhouse, the one about a little thing being fierce, and she made him cut it small, the way a keeper trims a wick, so that only those who climbed the stairs would ever read it.