Close-up of a dark blue script tattoo reading 'Never a failure, always a lesson' across the ribs, with a pink bra top above it.

Script quote tattoo on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two lines of cursive script tattooed side by side on the side of a torso, reading 'Never a failure' above 'Always a lesson'. The letterforms have smooth, even linework in a dark blue-black ink with some variation in stroke weight. The shallow-focus frame crops the wearer's head out, showing only long blonde hair, a pink bra top and the skin around the text.

Lettering Ribs Script Quote Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had three holes in it by the October the wire went slack, and Mr Pargeter wanted them patched before the Scarborough dates. We had eleven people left under canvas and a tuba that only played in the key of regret. I kept the ledger in the back of the wagon, so I knew to the penny what we owed the farrier and what we did not have.

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Marguerite Lund had walked that wire for twenty-two years, and she was the reason anyone still paid at the gate. On the Tuesday she came off at the second pole and landed in the sawdust with her wrist folded the wrong way. She did not cry. She asked me to fetch the old board from the caravan door and hold it steady while she read it with her good hand flat on her knee. Her mother had painted it in cream letters on blue-black paint, and the letters leaned forward as if they had somewhere to be.

"Never a failure, always a lesson," Marguerite read, and then she laughed at herself. "My mother put that up when the show was prosperous. It was the only thing she ever said that I believed." She told Pargeter the wire would be rigged again by the Monday. He called her a stubborn old goat, and I wrote in the ledger that we had taken four shillings that week, the first time since spring.

On the Monday I climbed the rigging with a borrowed rope and a sack of sawdust under me in case I fell, and I did fall, twice, into the net. Each time I got up I looked at the board nailed to the wagon door, which someone had left in the light. Then I went up a third time and stayed there, and from the top of the tent the sawdust looked like a clean page.