Black script lettering tattoo on the ribs reading Without struggle, There is no progress, shown beside a pink top.

Script quote tattoo on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script quote tattoo on the side of a torso, reading Without struggle on the first line and There is no progress on the second. The lettering uses smooth, flowing strokes of even weight with a slight slant, and the ink is solid black with no shading or colour. The text runs diagonally across the ribs, with a pink top and a light background filling the frame.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis had painted the word struggle three times before Walter would let him go on to the rest of the board. The shop was Pargeter and Sons, Saddlers, on Market Street in Hebden Bridge, though nobody had been a Pargeter since the war took the younger son, and the fascia had cracked down the middle in the damp of last winter. Walter sat on an upturned crate with his pipe unlit and watched the boy's wrist lift off the board at the end of each stroke, the way it always did.

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"Down, then across," Walter said. "The ink wants dragging, not throwing."

Dennis wiped the brush on his trousers and tried again. The letters leaned the right way, slanting like hawthorn bent by the wind, but the loops on the capitals pinched shut. Walter lifted the board off the easel, held it up to the window, and let the light show every fault. Then he laid it face down on the sawdust.

"Again," he said.

It was past six when the lamp came on in the back room, and the boy's shoulders had gone stiff from holding still. Walter scraped a crust of old paint from the corner with his thumbnail and nodded at what was left. Dennis had kept the downstroke of the W long and even, and the tail of the g curled back under itself the way his uncle had shown him one afternoon years ago, a thing he now did without thinking.

Walter said nothing about it. He only tapped the wet curl with one finger, carefully, so as not to smudge it, and went to put the kettle on. Dennis stayed where he was and watched the ink dry from black to a deep, glossy blue, and he did not touch the board again until morning.